The Taste of Defeat
by Speechwriter
Summary: -Sort of old work- Sokka has been captured by the Fire Nation, but he's made a promise, and he will not break. T for violence; bear with me the first couple of chapters! A Sokkla fic, because Sokkla is hot. Possibly also Kataang, with background Tokka.
1. The Only Thing I Want

_The Only Thing I Want_

I wanted my life.

I strove to survive, though I was chained into darkness with not even the slightest glimmer of luminescence to be seen far ahead. I longed to be a bender if just to see my own gaunt reflection in the pools of water that lapped at my ankles in the pit.

I could taste the blood in my mouth after the constant torture I endured. The iron taste filled my mouth and I could feel warm liquid running down my bare back. Sometimes I struggled even to remember my own name; my pounding head seemed to want to explode from the smell of mold, and I constantly breathed raggedly.

Dread came with the sliver of light that signified her coming. If death had a human manifestation, it would be her form, sharp fingernails blood red and ebony hair tied back in a loose bun. Whenever she entered the room, I saw a slight shine from the fire nation insignia embedded in her thick hair, and smelled the deadly perfume wafting from her. I froze, terrified, hoping that somehow she would not notice my stricken form and leave my battered body alone to bleed. It never happened.

I would see insane reflections of her twisted face in the puddles as lightning flashed from her fingertips with dangerous precision. Every time it burnt into my flesh, I would smell charred skin and scream pathetically. When she yanked me upright by the throat and slammed me against the wall face-first, I could feel the bones of my nose grate out of place and splinter. I never fought back. Sometimes I could hear her hot breathing and see the cruel slant of her black eyebrows. Sometimes I could catch a glimpse of her golden eyes, but not once could I see any humanity in their depths.

I recalled past burns as I saw that slit of light once more in the wall, the door starting to open. I saw her delicate form stalk in and I remained, as always, stock-still. Afraid to breathe, I closed my eyes and prayed, prayed that she would turn and leave me to die.

She found me, pulled me upright, and kicked me onto the floor. Onto my bare skin, she placed a white-hot fingertip.

My screams echoed for a long time after it was over. My panting was punctuated by ragged sobs.

I struggled to remember my name before I forgot once more, and found I couldn't recall it.

I was alone, with no sister, no companions, and no hope. I was a shell with no identity. I didn't matter.

Not in that hellhole.

* * *

A song echoed out of a steamy room. It was a strange tune, with a major key, but definitely a minor lilt.

If one were to walk in, they would see a beautifully painted bathroom, large enough to house a family, and a bathtub that held enough water to drown in. Spirals of steam rose from the scalding water, but of course, she felt no pain.

Azula heated her own water to the perfect temperature – right where her skin started to tingle and she could melt metal in it.

One might think she was an ordinary girl, although extraordinarily beautiful. Her regal features were relaxed, and her hair drifted around her bare shoulders. Her slender legs and arms were toned from constant exercise, and her stomach was flat from a well-balanced fire nation diet. One could think she was normal if they disregarded the swirls of lightning playing over her carefully lotioned hands.

"When La above glows, the wind whistles in the roses, and when the sky is grey with dawn, the tiger dove sings her song of sadness," she sang, the haunting melody being dampened by the furry carpet.

Slowly she lifted her naked form and closed her eyes, bringing her hands together softly. Steam lifted off her body alarmingly, and within seconds, not a drop of water remained on her.

Azula left the water there. It would most likely be reused by someone of lesser importance.

"Maid!" she called in a sharp voice. "Bring me my insignia."

A round old lady scuttled in immediately with Azula's golden fire nation symbol. Azula snatched it from her and placed it on the enameled bureau. Slowly she ran a brush through her silken hair and pressed a reddened finger to her lips, spreading color over them. She swiftly wound a scarlet ribbon into her hair and nestled the gold into it, leaving two long locks of midnight floating to frame her carved face. Azula pressed a scented cloth to her neck. Slowly she donned her crimson robes and descended the palace's sweeping staircase.

Azula turned briskly and descended four more flights of steps, lighting a fire in her palm as she descended and the sunlight died. The walls, she noted with disgust, were dripping water foully. A guard saluted her and held the door open to the last cell on the bottom floor, where the most wretched of criminals were kept.

An animal grin split her face as she motioned for the guard to shut the door. She kicked around for the huddled form for a while before finding the water tribe boy. Practicing on a real human was so much more delightfully satisfying than a flimsy mannequin, Azula pondered to herself as he screamed under her heat.

As she pushed him to the ground once more, she heard him mutter something.

"What was that?" she said in a quiet, yet piercing tone.

He said something again, too quietly for her to decipher. Slowly, she bent down beside him and lifted his face out of the mud.

He wiped his face off weakly with a sleeve that was already miserably sodden with mud. Azula wrinkled her nose in disgust as he spat out blood and dirt mixed together.

"You will not break me," he croaked, and she raised an arched eyebrow. Then she smirked briefly, and looked at him with new respect. Dropping Sokka's head back into the mud with a small thud, Azula shoved his face down onto the ground and sat on his bloody back, eager to hear his grunt of pain. He did not disappoint her. She whispered into his ear, "I have."

She thought that what she had said was true. She thought she already had broken him.

Lying in the mud, Sokka's mind suddenly jerked back into place.

_My name is Sokka._

He lifted himself off the ground on shaking limbs and allowed a tear to fall from his eye.

_And I will not die here._

_Not yet.

* * *

_

**Feel free to leave a review. As far as I can see, this will be a Sokkla fic. Although I can't see it happening (I'm a Tokka fan), it's an interesting enough ship, and I might as well experiment, eh?**

**Lurve,**

**Gollum**


	2. Dying Inside Me

_Dying Inside Me_

"Why can't we go _help_?" growled Toph. "I don't want to _sit_ here anymore!"

"Toph. We are staying here because Aang needs healing, and he's our only hope," Katara said frustratedly, leaning over Aang's prone form.

"Katara," Toph hissed. "We've been here for five months. Don't you care enough about your own brother to-"

Katara suddenly leapt to her feet, and lashed out with a hand wildly. Toph's limbs twisted and she landed face-first in the dirt. She could feel Katara's breathing coming strong, and could almost imagine the waterbender's expression.

Katara's face showed a mixture of hatred and anger. Her teeth were practically bared, and her blue eyes were hard. She slowly twisted her hand, bringing Toph back up into a sitting position. Striding over to the earthbender, Katara threw down her water skin.

"I told you not to – how can you – Toph!" she yelled.

Toph struggled to move. "I'm sorry!" she shouted. "It was out of line."

"Yes, it was," Katara snapped back, and stopped bloodbending. "Don't talk about it!" She glared at Toph. Then, abruptly, as if nothing had happened, she walked back over to the fallen Avatar's side, sat down, and took water from the air.

Toph slowly stood and walked over to the cliff's edge. She grunted softly, shook her head, and flicked a pebble into the chasm below.

"How's Aang?" she asked Katara quietly, a few minutes later.

Katara sighed, her head bowed. "You want the truth?"

"I'll know the truth," Toph responded, and Katara smiled weakly.

Aang lay face-up in front of Katara, brow creased in a never-ending frown. His body was littered with various scars, his broken bones were still healing fully, and his weakened stomach could only accept food once a day.

Five months ago, in the exact same spot, they had been ambushed on the way to help Sokka. A platoon of firebenders had knocked Aang unconscious and thrown him over the cliff. Although Toph had retrieved his stricken body as quickly as possible, his injuries were almost beyond help.

At least thirty of Aang's airbender-light bones had shattered, including his spine. It was a miracle, Katara said, that his neck had not broken as well, in which case it would have been impossible for him to heal. As it was, Katara had had to stop a lot of hemorrhaging before even starting to set his bones back in place. Her bloodbending had come in handy, but Toph had felt useless, and without anyone to help the pair to get along, there had been a lot of fighting.

Toph was in favor of her going to rescue Sokka while Katara stayed back, but Katara insisted that alone, they were too weak to help anyone.

"Besides Aang," Toph had pointed out. "You could stay here and heal Aang, and I could go and rescue Sokka. What's wrong with it?"

"You against every guard in the Royal District? I don't think so, Toph," Katara had said. "Earthbender or not, you're still blind."

Apparently, Aang's immune system had suffered a blow; Aang's natural bone-healing process was proving to be slower than usual. Nonetheless, Katara had sealed the wounds, and after four and a half months, results had finally started to show. Katara could move Aang's elbows and knees without his nerves twitching involuntarily.

Unfortunately, this gave way to more strife between Katara and Toph in the last two weeks, who were arguing almost all the time. And now Aang had rolled over in his perpetual sleep, causing unsettlement of the water splints that Katara had set in place.

"He's not good," said Katara.

"What? He wasn't bad yesterday!" yelped Toph.

"He rolled over. I've been working on him since seven, and I think he might be getting back to where he was. But now that he's more conscious, I think we'll have to strap him to the ground so it won't happen again."

Toph stomped once on the ground, and a snake of rock ran over Aang's body, securing him to the ground.

Katara shook her head slowly as Toph rampaged into the distance, fuming about wasted time. As she ran her water-clad hands over Aang's battered skin, she tried to put the lingering thoughts of her brother out of her mind.

Even though Sokka was seventeen, she doubted that he could handle Azula and her torturers.

Not, however, that Azula needed torturers. She was perfectly capable of it herself.

* * *

"Zuzu!" Azula called, walking briskly towards her brother. 

"Yeah?" Zuko answered roughly from the dining table, eating lunch.

"Zuzu, I have a dilemma."

"…yes?" sighed Zuko, glancing up at his eighteen-year-old sister.

"The guards have informed me that the water tribe boy is sick," she replied.

"How is that a problem?" asked Zuko.

"Well, you see, I practice several of my techniques on him, and there are no other prisoners available on which to do so. If he dies, I will have lost a valuable… what is it? Punching bag."

"Disaster," said Zuko sarcastically. "Just give him some food and maybe he'll get better."

"That's not to mention," continued Azula, "that he remains a lure for the Avatar and his friends. If he finds out that the boy is dead, the Avatar may go into the Avatar state and destroy the palace. And we don't want that."

Zuko yawned and continued to eat.

"The guards say that he needs fresh air and sunlight. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?" muttered Azula.

"They're just guards. Try food first. Food is always essential for someone's diet."

"Good job, Zuko," Azula said caustically, and left the room. "Ty Lee! Mai! Where are you?"

Ty Lee instantly slid down the large marble banister, giggling. "What is it, Azula?"

"I'm up here if you need something," yelled Mai from the second floor.

"Ty Lee, take some food to the water tribe boy in the dungeon," ordered Azula.

"But it's so dark and drippy," Ty Lee whined. "Can you come with me?"

Azula looked with disdain at her companion. "Very well," she sighed, and picked at a red nail.

_Three days earlier_

Sokka dug through sand with his hands, cooling his fevered skin. His breathing was ragged, and his dark flesh felt like it was on fire. His eyes rolled briefly, and he dug his hands deeper into the sand.

He jumped as his fingers hit fabric, hidden underneath the grainy mass. Slowly, he tugged at it, his weak muscles straining to move pounds of sand from the cloth.

Eventually, the item came loose. Sokka shook the sand off it and peered closer. Suddenly, he recognized it – it was his shirt, which had long since been discarded. The rough material was full of sand.

Sokka placed it in a nearby pool of water and lifted it, expecting the sand to come out. Instead, more sand stuck in it, and clean water dripped beneath it.

Sokka's mind, once so sharp, started to move slowly. It was a water filter. With a water filter, he could … he could drink without tasting grit.

He closed his eyes, thanked the spirits, and began to move the sand to the walls of the circular cell. It would be easier to filter the water once the sand was out of the way.

He had something to help him stay alive. However small it was.

_Current time_

Azula opened the cell door and gasped as she stepped into thin air. Her foot soon hit icy water, and she plunged face-first into a pool.

"Well, no wonder you're sick," she said out loud, warming her arms with fire.

"Where is he?" Ty Lee whispered, stepping onto a sandbar that ran around the wall.

"I don't know," said Azula. She held her lit torch high, looking for the boy's emaciated body. "Oh, there he is."

Sokka lay on the sandbar, breathing gently, spasming every so often with cold.

"Azula! What have you been doing to him?" murmured Ty Lee, leaping over to Sokka's side.

"Oh, nothing much. Just practice."

"Practice?" yelped Ty Lee. "He's almost dead! We had a monkey in this state at the circus, and he died in two days!"

"If you say so," said Azula coolly. "So what should we do, primate-master?"

"Well, let's see… he needs food, and he needs heat. Fresh air, light, medicine."

"I can't afford to waste medicine on this… peasant!" said Azula haughtily. She toyed with the flames atop her torch.

"Um, yes, you can," said Ty Lee.

"Well, yes, I can, but why should I?"

"Because… he'll die?" Ty Lee said timidly.

"A technicality," Azula snorted. "I'll try Zuzu's plan first, and if the boy doesn't get better, then I'll consider your idea. Go ahead back upstairs."

Ty Lee cast one last sympathetic glance at Sokka and exited the cell. Azula leapt lightly onto the sandbar and nudged Sokka with a boot lightly. She stuck her torch upright into the sand, casting a steady glow over the water tribe boy's battered features.

"Wake up," she commanded. Sokka curled up into a ball and looked up slowly.

"I brought you food," said Azula with disgust, and placed a plate next to Sokka's head. "You'd better eat it. I think you'd be more fun alive than dead."

Sokka reached out a dirty hand and grabbed an apple off his plate. Azula watched as he tried to nibble at it, his eyes squinted shut and his head jerking from side to side. A strange feeling pervaded her senses as she watched him attempt to eat, and she realized that it was something like pity.

"Here," she said, and snatched the food from him. Lifting the young man, she sat him against the wall and held the apple up to his mouth. His head merely lolled from side to side. Azula sighed and held the apple in both hands. She quickly pulverized it with lightning, and with distaste placed the heated glop into the cup she had brought along.

With the torchlight to guide her, she opened his mouth and poured some of the apple down his throat. Suddenly, Sokka gasped and his eyes snapped open. Blinking, he fell sideways onto Azula's knee. She recoiled momentarily, and then gently removed his head from her leg and pushed him back against the wall. She stared at him for a moment. He didn't move.

"Wake up," she hissed, and shot lightning at the opposite wall in frustration. As the noise reached Sokka, his eyes opened slowly. He was soundless, but the fear in his eyes betrayed him.

"Are you awake?" Azula asked quietly.

Sokka nodded, and cringed as Azula moved.

"Calm down," she said scathingly. Then, "Get better," she ordered, and left, leaving the torch behind.

Sokka huddled over the torch's warmth and swallowed some more of the apple-sludge. Suddenly, he stopped. Recalling Azula's face, he could have sworn that he had seen emotion in her eyes.

And he knew that Azula's psychopathic mind generally did not permit such things.

Slowly, he continued to eat.

* * *

**Feel free to drop me a review. Thanks to my reviewers.**

**Lurve.**

**Gollum.**


	3. Seesaw

**I had said Sokka was seventeen; my bad. He's actually nineteen, given that Azula is eighteen.**

It had been a week. Sokka felt like a prince, pampered beyond belief. Every day, there was food. Every day, there was water. Most days, there was not even a glimpse of his captor or her malicious smile or her blood-red fingernails. They had even given him an incredibly warm woolen blanket, which had eliminated his fever after a few days.

He should have known it could not last.

Sitting with his back against the cold stone, he was more levelheaded than he had been in a while. Fragments of sanity were beginning to stream back to him. Memories of his sister, waterbending, memories of the young blind girl… memories of that pale monk with his bizarre tattoos. But he could not for the life of him distinguish what these last two people had to do with anything. His sister… what was her name?

Oh, it didn't matter.

Suddenly, voices echoed through the window in the cell door. Sokka turned his head slightly, looking at the little square of warm light. The echoing of the circular dungeon made it incredibly hard to distinguish words.

"…anymore," he heard his male guard say, and then a female voice… a dreadfully cheerful-sounding female voice.

"Excellent," it said with cold precision.

Then again, what did she ever do that lacked cold precision?

Sokka gritted his teeth, and with great precarious strength he rose to his feet. It was the first time he had stood since – how long must it have been, that he had rotted here? A decade? A month?

It didn't matter, because he heard the key rattling in the door. Nothing mattered once she was in the room. Nothing mattered but the pain and the inevitability. Nothing.

But now, everything had changed.

The nineteen-year-old boy-man was on his feet, swaying only minimally. Standing at five feet, eleven inches, he would tower over her – her frail five foot three body – as if he were an actual person.

Wasn't that a stupid thing to think? Of course he was an actual person. Sokka slowly cracked his knees and walked over to the door.

The lock clicked. A silhouette appeared.

A derisive cackle flooded the chamber. Azula made a motion, and the guard scurried away, leaving the two absolutely alone.

"Oh, Sokka," she laughed. That was strange. He didn't think she even knew his name. "You're on your feet! Wonderful, wonderful."

She clapped her hands together like an excited little girl. "This hasn't happened since…"

Approaching him, she looked him up and down, appearing to be on top of the world. "Well, since we managed to get you here, really."

Azula took one finger and put it under his chin, lifting it, appraising his profile. "Your nose has healed surprisingly well, given the amount of things I've done to it," she chuckled in a low voice. Looking him over as if he were cattle for sale, she did something he never expected her to do. She sat down slowly, the smile still on her face, and gestured for him to sit next to her. He did.

"You are astoundingly stupid, you realize that?" Azula's voice said in the near-pitch darkness.

He said nothing. She continued, still with a shocking lack of abuse. "If you were intelligent, you would have stayed on the ground. I assume you've heard me when I say I like them better the more alive they are."

His voice was gritty and low from disuse. He replied, "I told you that I would not break. I won't."

Now she threw her head back and laughed mirthlessly. "I like you!" she said in-between icy chortling. "If you were only a bender, this would not be nearly so boring."

"If I were a bender," he said quietly, "you would be dead."

She turned to him, raising an eyebrow. "You dare to presume that under any circumstance you could best me?"

Her crimson lips quirked into a smile, revealing perfect white teeth. Her gorgeous countenance twisted into a grimace as she concentrated momentarily, bringing up lightning to crackle around the room. "You think you could harness such power?"

She sighed and raised herself back to her feet. "I suppose you haven't learned your lessons. Stand back up if you'd like; it shall make no difference."

Sokka quickly weighed the options. He could stand. He could stand and fight. Fighting might make it over more quickly, though if he actually landed a blow it might prolong it for hours more. Or he could sit, hopelessly, as she resumed her previous ways.

He stood back up, swallowing as he settled back into a stance.

The look of absolute hilarity on her face enraged him. He would show her.

She pointed downwards, swirling blue flames around her talented hands within milliseconds.

But she did not expect him to sprint at her, knocking the breath out of her as his body crushed hers to the ground.

Her shocked golden eyes bored into his blue-grey, barely-human ones. He had a look of utter madness about him. And although she would never admit it, his height gave him a huge advantage. He had to outweigh her by at least fifty pounds. His strong hands held her wrists to the filthy sand beneath them, while he leaned down and growled into her ear, "Where's your firebending now?"

He could feel her smile as she whispered back, "Here, you idiot." She lay her head back on the sand and opened her mouth, her tongue wringing fire from the freezing air. A guttural noise erupted from the back of her throat, and fire belched from her mouth, viciously burning into Sokka's bare chest. He made no noise, but lurched backwards, his face the image of agony, his eyes clenched shut, his mouth open in anguish.

His feet led him to the pool of water and the wound in his chest sizzled with excruciating pain, tingling around the edges. He touched his fingertips to the raw flesh and sucked in air between his teeth.

When he looked back at Azula, she stood casually as if nothing had happened. "Now, that was absolutely no fun, was it?" she droned, blowing frustratedly at her hair.

He surprised her by walking back to stand in front of her. Suddenly, Azula felt uneasy. He looked so much more human while he was standing. He even reminded her of her own brother. One side of her mouth curled in irreverent contempt. The crazed look had gone from his eyes, and now he merely looked miserable. But there was an undercurrent in his gaze.

"Don't you look at me like that," Azula hissed, and Sokka could practically see her proverbial fur standing on end.

"Like what?" he said gently, calmly observing the eighteen-year-old. Sokka thought maybe he was relapsing into illness, because right now he thought she looked very pretty. And while she raged and fumed, he felt no fear. Not even anger, at this point. He felt so sorry for her. So sorry that her conscience would one day have to feel the pain he felt now a hundred times over.

She walked up to him and jabbed a nail right into the middle of his injury. Sokka looked skywards and his eyes started to stream tears. He jerked his tongue back so that he would not bite through it in his agony. "Like you're my equal," she spat, her hot breath brushing his neck.

He looked down at her, and she took her finger from his chest, observing the injury. She wiped the blood on her nail gently on Sokka's shoulder, looking him in the eye, her cool hatred matching his sad indifference. "But I am," he whispered, and at that she whipped her hand at his face, delivering a stinging slap.

He didn't even turn his face. Her face contorted into a feral snarl as his remained sinfully blank, looking down at her sadly. "I am," he repeated, and she slapped him again.

Her bared teeth snorted warm breath from between the perfectly even top and bottom rows. "You are nothing," she said. "I am everything."

Sokka slowly put a tanned hand on her shoulder. Azula didn't know why she didn't incinerate him for doing so. "Fine," he said. "You can be everything today. Now, you may as well get started."

He slowly got on the ground as she shook with rage, sitting crosslegged, waiting for the worst.

And the worst came. The worst came in a barrage of flame and steel-toed boot. But this time was different – instead of silence on her side, he was deathly quiet, and every time she beat him down, she made a noise as if she herself was being struck. A noise of desperate, absolute loneliness.

When she went back to her room, she lay on her bed and she cried for a very long time, for the first time since she could remember. But while she was doing it, the only thing she could think of was the boy's comatose, broken body she had left far below her, haunting her from downwards up.

* * *

Katara hummed quietly to herself, moving the water over Aang's prone body almost in a daze. She pictured her brother, his smile, his voice… She missed him more, each day, than she could possibly describe. She felt his absence like an ever-present wound, digging away at her sanity. Katara, though, was strong. She would survive, as she always did, and she would persevere, like she always did.

Toph, on the other hand, was feeling weaker by the minute. There was no denying her feelings towards Sokka, and she could hardly train to make herself feel better. She already knew she was the best earthbender in history, so what would training accomplish? Toph had been tired of the waiting by the third week, and it was now nearly half a year since she'd been near Sokka. She had no idea how Katara managed what she did.

"How's Aang?" Toph said, sidling up to where Katara sat.

Katara jerked out of her reverie, looking at the blind girl. "He's… he's a lot better, actually. Only a couple more bones need healing. He just needs to get out of this coma."

"Jeez, Twinkletoes," sighed Toph. "Please just wake up… it's been six months."

"I really hope he will," Katara murmured, smoothing Aang's hair back from his head. "This is not good. Not at all."

She slowly moved her water up to his forehead, brushing over things she had already healed, smoothing the scars.

Toph frowned. "Why isn't he waking up? I don't get it."

"I don't know," Katara replied softly. "He's just… I don't know, his brain is just sleeping."

"Then wake him the hell up," Toph snapped, and instantly looked remorseful, her hand brushing her hair back from her forehead in frustration. "Sorry. I just… we have got to… we've got to get to Sokka. I can't stand this. I can't. I mean, you're here for Aang. Why am I here? Can't I just… can't I just go get him?"

"You're going to singlehandedly storm the capital?" Katara asked. "I think not. We've been over this – I need my brother as much as you do, but -"

"KATARA!" Toph yelled, her head jerking back to the prone figure of Aang. "He just moved!"

Katara's eyes whipped back to her patient. "Are you serious?" she said in a low voice, scrutinizing Aang. Then – yes. Yes. His finger was slowly moving, tapping the earth erratically. "Spirits above," Katara whispered reverently. "Aang? Can you hear me? Aang?"

Toph knelt down by Aang, her expression pleading. "Twinkletoes, wake up. Open your eyes."

On cue, the airbender's eyes opened just a fragment. Then a little more. His grey irises, which neither girl had seen in nearly half a year, shone with the reflection of a blue sky. Aang blinked weakly. His lips parted a little, and his weakened voice eked out, "Katara?"

"Fine, ignore me," Toph said, her voice shaking with excitement and relief.

"Toph," Aang added. "Where am I?"

The seventeen-year-old looked around, his eyes flicking from side to side. Toph slowly bent the ground forwards, propping Aang up at a forty-five degree angle. "We're in the woods," Toph explained.

"Where's… Sokka?" Aang breathed, his eyebrows furrowing in light confusion.

Katara and Toph couldn't speak. Katara shook her head slowly. "Sokka was… he was captured, Aang. Remember? We were on our way to the Palace, and there was – Zuko, he – you fell – we had to stop right here to start fixing you up, and…"

She wasn't making any sense, she knew, but it still hurt to remember it. Sokka.

One tear leaked out of Aang's left eye. "How long…?" he asked.

"Five months, two weeks," Toph answered in a low voice. Aang let out a pathetic sobbing splutter.

"Okay. How much of your body can you move?" Katara said fussily, trying to shove aside the mourning atmosphere.

Aang weakly turned his head to her. "Neck," he said. Then he opened his mouth wider, moving his facial muscles gently. As if he were just learning how, he lifted his right and left arms. "Feels like everything's new," he muttered.

He tried bending forwards, but his face contorted in pain.

Katara was on him like a hawk. "Where does it hurt?" she demanded. Aang pointed to a rib.

She moved her water over it – a slight fracture she'd missed. He sighed as the soothing touch of the healing sealed up his rib. Then he sat forward, moving more freely now.

He slowly slid his legs up until his knees were bent, placing his hands on the ground.

As he agonizingly tried to stand, Katara and Toph put their hands on his arms, steadying him.

"Aang," Toph said, "you're back."

He stood, all five foot nine of him, his tattoo snaking up his back under various scars. He slowly lowered himself into an airbending stance, groaning as his back, neck, knees, and knuckles popped with near simultaneity. "Okay," he groaned, feeling the air currents rush by him. He moved his hand around one, flicking it towards a nearby tree. Its leaves ruffled gently. "Airbending's fine."

Aang slowly created a tiny flame in the palm of his right hand, called up a clump of earth from the ground, and drew a thin stream from and back into Katara's waterskin.

Katara, Aang, and Toph shared a gentle hug. But Toph felt only guilt, because she was not glad that Aang was better, but that they could finally find Sokka. And deep down, Katara felt the same.


	4. The Unwise Revelation

**On my last chapter, I got the following review:**

"**I'd read this but you said it had Zutara in it. IMMEDIATE TURN OFF"**

**Wow, you're cool. **

**Thanks for helping me with my writing! Couldn't do it without people like you, you know.**

**Right. Now that I've had my daily fill of caustic, biting internet-sarcasm, let's continue with the story and ignore those who are too asinine to see that the main plot point is clearly the relationship between Sokka and Azula.**

**Thanks, by the way, to my reviewers. :) I love y'all.**

* * *

Things had not gotten better for him. Since that strange day, Azula had been more and more vicious, and he could feel the humanity leaking from his edges again. Psychologically, he had worked himself into a box. He could only think of himself as 'he' once again, having forgotten his name, inconveniently, once again.

She did make him remember hers, though, as much as he didn't want to.

"Scream it," she would say in a dangerous voice. "Mercy, Princess Azula. Say it."

"No," he would reply. "No. I will never say it."

"Then you will never receive it," she would reply with a facsimile of pity buried in that steel tone of hers. And then she would make him shriek for hours.

She walked into his cell one day. "Sokka," she said – _that_ was his name! – with a smile, "I would like you to meet my brother."

Zuko stood in the doorway, half-illuminated by torchlight.

"I know your brother," Sokka spat in disgust, surprised to find he did. "Zuko."

"Oh, Zuzu, isn't that nice?" Azula said with a smile, turning to her brother. "He remembers you!"

Zuko stepped down into the cell. "I thought you said he was crazy."

"I'm not crazy," Sokka said in a dangerous voice, standing slowly, clinging to the stone wall as he managed to get to his feet. "You betrayed us. Get… the hell… out of this room."

He lurched towards Zuko, who quickly left the cell, suddenly afraid – for some reason – to be in the same place as Sokka.

Azula sighed. "Zuko never was the bravest," she told Sokka, who gave a noncommittal 'meh' noise. "Oh, well… I'll never betray you, Sokka," she continued with a strange smile. "You can always rely on me." And, Sokka mused with a strange sense of comfort, it was true. She would always be the same towards him – unfailingly cruel.

She slowly sat on the stone steps leading into the dungeon, shutting the door with a clang. But she did not move from that spot. Sokka stood stock still, waiting for something to happen.

"So, Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe," she said coolly, "you've been here for six months today. Six months. Do you feel accomplished? That you haven't failed in your mission – not to break?"

"No," he replied.

"Why?"

"Because failure was never an option."

Azula's face shut down for a second, her eyes boring into the figure standing immediately ahead of her. Azula herself said that phrase on a regular basis. Failure isn't an option. It never is.

"I see," she said.

"How did you get like this?" Sokka asked suddenly, leaning against the wall.

Azula snorted, "Like what?"

"So iced over," Sokka sighed, sliding down to sit on the sand. "You don't feel. You don't love."

"How do you know what I feel?" Azula snapped instantly, filled with rage. The echoing in the dungeon died slowly, leaving absolute silence in its wake.

"I know," Sokka said finally. "I know you only want attention. You only want approval. You do nothing for yourself, but at the same time you do absolutely everything for yourself. You hate your brother. You hate who you are. You hate everything around you."

Azula gaped at him. "How dare you!" she said in a low, trembling voice, but it sounded false even to her. No one had ever talked to her that way. Even more so – no one had ever gotten anything about her right. "How dare you talk to me in such a manner?"

"You wanted me to say it," Sokka mumbled. "Otherwise you'd be burning me and kicking me right about now."

Azula was filled with the bizarre desire to laugh. Preposterous. She did not laugh unless she was doing something that was not supposed to merit laughter. That was her rule. And she never broke her rules. But it was true, a part of her mused. This pathetic filthy peasant had her pegged. A hidden bit of Azula had desperately wanted him to be as honest as he had been before, honest in his words and in his gaze…

She stood up, briskly walking over to the wall where he sat, nudging him experimentally with her boot as if she hadn't done it a million times before. "Well, if you know me so well," she muttered, "why don't you tell me why I'm like I am?"

"If I had to guess," Sokka sighed, "some sort of childhood trauma. Lack of fatherly or motherly attention. Objectification because of your obvious prodigious talent. Lack of trust in anyone or anything, but spirits know why that would be."

Azula sat back against the wall next to him, momentarily mollified. His intelligence pleased her. He was a smart one.

She looked at him. His shaggy brown hair was filthy, and his tanned face was covered in not so much as a beard as stubble that had decided to keep going for a while. His muscled bare chest was littered with burn marks, bruises, and scars.

"You are mine, right?" she mused, looking at the floor, but the words were not really to him.

"No," he answered.

She looked back up at him. "Yes. Yes, you are. Everything that happens in here is solely between you and me. You are mine."

"Then just kill me," he said bitterly.

Azula swallowed. Why had she not killed him already? It was strange. "No," she said. "No, I won't. That would not be… that would not be proper."

Her quick mind had figured it out. There was no reason to be the statue she was to everyone else down here. It was as if she were alone with herself. She could show emotion. She could have her own faults, miniscule as they might be. She could be human.

Down here in the darkness, she could be whatever the hell she wanted.

* * *

Aang slowly ate. His stomach could finally keep down food. Now that he was awake, he was improving quickly, exercising frequently and planning with Katara and Toph. They wouldn't lose any more time to his insufficiency.

He was speedily recalling most of his old bending abilities, especially with the training and aid of Katara and Toph. Although they never sparred, not wanting to hurt the already-injured, Aang felt that he could hold his own with either of his friends.

The plan was simple – get to the island where the palace was, burrow down into the earth, and feel their way to the holding cells. Well, that would be Toph's job, anyway, and she would do it well.

Appa was far too noticeable, of course – he would have to be left here with Momo. Katara suggested sending Appa to fly to Kyoshi Island, just in case. Aang, although distraught at leaving his one childhood friend, agreed.

They started moving again a week after Aang had awoken.

* * *

Sokka suspiciously looked at the tray of food. "What is this?" he said in a throaty voice. "You don't show up for a week, and when you do, you're carrying food?"

Azula smiled a tiny smile that curved the corners of her perfectly shaped red lips, and for once it didn't look like she was either in great pain doing so or insane. "It's good. You should eat it."

"Finally decided to get rid of me, huh?" Sokka muttered in disbelief, looking down at the food, which he was sure was poisoned. Oh well, better to die with a full stomach, right?

The water tribe boy dug into the food, which was – to his disbelief – hot. And also, not poisoned, given his lack of keeling over.

After he had inhaled the meal, Sokka lay down on the ground, facing the distant ceiling. "Okay," he sighed. "I'm ready."

"We're not… not today," Azula said. She couldn't find the word for what she usually did to him.

Sokka shot her a glance full of distrust and loathing, and she recoiled slightly. Suddenly, Azula asked, "Do you hate me?" She didn't know her reason for doing so.

"No," he sighed. "I can't hate you, because you can't possibly know what you're doing to me." _Because you're insane,_ he added silently.

She waited for him to elaborate. He realized there was another reason, too, one that wouldn't make her torture him. "You've already pushed everyone so far away that you don't know the pain of detachment."

Azula's brain processed the words. Had she?

"Who do you miss?" she asked quietly, sitting down a few feet from his prone figure. Her voice had lost its usual malice. She was letting down barriers.

She knew it was dangerous to let down barriers, because that made her vulnerable. But there was no one here besides her and the boy…

"My sister," Sokka replied instantly. "I don't even remember her name, and I miss her more than I can imagine."

Azula swallowed, her eyes roaming the stone walls. She would not miss Zuko if she were elsewhere, because he detested her already.

"Katara," she blurted out.

Sokka made a sudden motion.

"That's your sister's name," muttered Azula with an awkward glance over at him.

She realized that Sokka was curled up, shaking slightly. "Katara," he was whispering. "Oh, God."

"Anyone else?" Azula asked quietly.

"My father. My friends… I know they were there."

Azula knew the name of Sokka's father through war meetings, and of course she knew of the rest of the Avatar's crew. "Hakoda, Aang, and Toph," she said.

Sokka looked up at her, his reddened eyes filled with anguish. "Why are you doing this?" he groaned. "Why?"

Azula cocked her head. Surely he would want to remember the names of those closest to him?

She was lost for words. "You… why?" Sokka repeated, curling up. "How am I even supposed to know they're okay? How am I even supposed to know they're… still alive?"

"I'm sorry," Azula said. She hadn't even thought of that. And at these words, Sokka stared at her even harder.

"Are you… feeling all right?" Sokka asked, his voice dripping with irony.

"Well, you are here to do my whims," she said idly, "and right now I'd like to have a conversation with someone."

"Found someone else to torture?" Sokka's voice said. "That why you're treating me like a human being?"

Azula said nothing for a long time. "We're a lot alike," she finally answered.

Sokka spat at the sand a few feet away. "We are nothing alike," he assured her feverishly. "We are. Nothing. Alike." Azula suppressed her urge to shoot something in his direction. It made her angry that he couldn't see it.

"If you were in my position, you would be like me," Azula responded in a cold tone. "I'm a female in a place where, above all else, you are prided simply on being male." She paused. "I love my country. I know I'm supposed to rule, but to be that ruler, I must act the ruler. I must be so much more than my brother, who has forever had everything handed to him."

"I bet that's what he thinks of you," Sokka retorted. "You were virtually born a master firebender. You're smarter than he is and you have your father's respect. What more could you want?"

"I must know… I must know that I am the one to rule this nation," Azula said. "That is all I need. All I need."

"Why don't you want anything else?" Sokka asked, sitting upright in the sand. "A husband? A friend?"

"Ha," Azula laughed. "A husband? Why would I need someone to think that he can dominate me?"

Sokka sighed. She was incredibly insecure. "You could marry someone you love," he muttered.

"Who would love me?" Azula scoffed. "My own mother didn't even love me."

And that was it. Azula blinked and realized what she said. Then she quietly got up and left the room, leaving Sokka to wonder what all of that was about.

Sokka had heard of Stockholm Syndrome – the victim growing to have a perverse sort of love for his captor – but he had never heard of the reverse.

Azula was soaking in her bathtub, but the steaming water was not relaxing her as much as it should have been. She thought for a long while about who she was. She was not a psychopath. She took a deep breath. She must not be a psychopath. She loved seeing her will executed, but then – so did everyone, right? That must be normal, surely. She loved seeing justice being wrought, but that was not a sign of psychopathic nature. It was just moralistic right and wrong. And more than anything, she loved her art – the gorgeous art of firebending, and the flickering light it burned within her. She loved the raw power blasting from wherever she wished, whenever she wished. Spirits, if she only did one thing for the rest of her life, it would be firebending. Without a second thought, she knew that.

Azula could only feel indifference to what she did to that water tribe boy. She felt no remorse at all, just blankness. He was, after all, helping her attain perfection, and that was a good reason for… for anything, really. Yes, Azula reasoned, there was a good motivation for it. But then again, she might as well stop, too. She could always practice in the courtyard, and the boy did provide good conversation. Definitely a new perspective, if nothing else. It would be irritating if he died. No, not irritating. Azula's brow furrowed as she tried to think of the word. If he died, what would it be?

The eighteen-year-old sighed and sunk down below the water, her eyes peeking over the still crystal surface, looking through tendrils of steam. Why had she let him know about her mother? That was weak. Weak and stupid.

Who would be going down there, though? No one. No one at all. There was no one that boy could tell about her deepest fear. Her biggest weakness. No one.

If the boy died, it would be sad.

Azula stepped out of the hot bath and the cold air slammed into her.

She frowned. If he died, it would be sad. Foreign as the concept was, it was true.

Mystery solved, Azula set back to her regular activities with the same perfection as usual. This boy would not weaken her resolve to be the best. Rather, he would strengthen it. So what if she would feel pity if he died? It wasn't as if she had not pitied before…

* * *

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**~SW**


	5. Betrayal

"After everything I've done for him!" Azula hissed, sending a spark of lightning hissing involuntarily from between her teeth. "His cheek is astonishing. I don't know who he thinks he's fooling. I know he's nothing but a traitor - and a coward!" She leaned low to one side, taking two fingers and drawing not a spark, now, but a dangerous streak of lightning from the darkness. She unleashed it up into the air, where it ricocheted for a couple of seconds, and then crackled back into silence.

"Believe me," said the voice from the wall, "I know how you feel."

Azula glared over at the water tribe boy. How could he possibly know the utter hatred Azula felt towards Zuko? Their relationship was complicated, to say the least. How could Sokka feel he had any sort of claim to the same?

"Do you know how I got caught by your guards?" Sokka laughed in a hollow tone. "Your son-of-a-bitch brother sold us out. He traveled with us for, what, six months? I can't even remember, but then he went and he told the guards in some random Fire Nation town that he was traveling with us, and planned an ambush. I woke up. I managed to get my friends out of there before the guards managed to get me. But they chained me, and when they were holding me, I couldn't look at anything except Zuko's face. He had this really disgusted look, like, disgusted with himself, or with what he'd done? I don't even know."

Azula wrinkled her nose in distaste. Azula was a lot of things, but she would never betray those to whom she felt true loyalty. The people in Ba Sing Se were mere toys, the Generals pawns and the Dai Li convenient tools. She had no qualms about betraying them, because they could very well take care of themselves – but to blatantly disregard any sort of honorable action? To betray an equal? Azula thought for a second, wondering if she would ever do that to Ty Lee or Mai, but the very notion was repulsive.

Sokka continued, "I wouldn't mind, you know? I mean, I would, but not as much if it weren't us. We took him in, for god's sake. How could he do that to Katara? How could he do that to Aang?" Sokka's voice cracked. "How could he do that to us?"

His testimonial had somewhat stilled Azula's rage, which had previously been fueled by the fact that Zuko had purposefully asked their father to hold a war meeting without Azula's knowledge. In comparison to the treachery this kid had undergone, though, her trouble suddenly seemed petty. Azula was used to thinking of herself and no one else, but she couldn't deny that Zuko's behavior tugged at her sense of honor.

Azula had a very peculiar variety of deceit under her belt. She was an expert manipulator, with an innate sense of people's greatest discomforts. Double-crossing the arrogant and weak was a specialty of hers. But when it came to doing something outright perfidious, she staunchly refused to take part. After all, she had an image to maintain. One of terror in its perfection, not one of terror marred by dirty, underhanded operations.

Zuko didn't even realize how unintelligent he was. That was how unintelligent he was. Azula sighed. "Zuzu has never really appreciated all that I do," she said. "When I told father that he had killed the Avatar, my ulterior motive would only apply if he had not deceived me."

Azula's gold eyes flashed angrily, and she squatted down in the sand, staring into the pool of water at the center of the dungeon. "Of course, he did. Just as he always does," she spat bitterly. "You can't trust anyone."

Sokka sat on the sand. Azula rarely came in these days, but when she did, it was only to talk. Even today, when she had been raging crazily, she didn't hurt him. Sokka didn't understand it. Why was she doing it? She had to have a reason.

But it was odd. Either she was a very good actress, or she actually had an inkling of feeling behind those cold tiger's eyes. Every time she came in, she would be worried or strained, anxiously thinking. She used to seem so in control while she tortured him pitilessly, but now she seemed to have lost her grip on him. She had willingly relinquished control on him, and Sokka appreciated it to the point where he would talk with her.

It was an unsteady truce. Azula's borderline-crazy logic sometimes degenerated into childish tantrums involving huge amounts of searing fire and shrieking, and a lot of the time she would appear so disgusted with Sokka's presence that she would not look at him. Or, at least, that was what it seemed like. Meanwhile, he figured there was nothing else to do. He did wonder where all the water was coming from, but he didn't dare plunge into the icy cold water to find a way out, only to die of hypothermia.

And now Azula was talking about how she couldn't trust anyone?

Sokka was a smart guy. He loved puzzles. And a burst of interest, the first burst of anything he had felt in a while, bloomed in him. Was this why Azula was so… herself? Was this lack of trust stemming from something he didn't know about?

"What do you mean?" he said slowly.

She shook her head, but to Sokka's surprise, there was no accompanying yell or explosion. She bit her full, red, bottom lip, looking upwards at the ceiling. "No, boy. Not going to bring that story up from the dead."

Sokka felt a mild wave of disappointment. He knew Azula had good reason to trust no one – Mai and Ty Lee's betrayal, temporary as it may have been. That was after her psychosis had already been made clear, though. What was at the very root of the problem? "Well, if -"

"Shut up!" spat Azula. Sokka heard her exhale slowly, the very hint of a shudder at the edge of her breath. He realized she might be having some sort of personal epiphany and kept silent, staring at the wall absentmindedly.

After a few minutes, she walked out without another word.

He didn't know how long passed. There was no way to tell night from day. Everything was simply black, except for the torchlight slipping in through the tiny window on his door. But he did know that there was no way to tell how long it had been since she had last been.

It was definitely a relief. It was easy to identify the part of him that was relieved – the part that was scared, if not terrified, of the girl. The part that was scared she would snap at any second from her seemingly now-existent sanity. The strange thing, though, was the part of him that missed her visits. Sokka surmised that it was due to his now interminable loneliness. They didn't give him food regularly, but every so often, sometimes after what must have been a couple days. There was only him and his memories.

It hurt too much to remember, though. And he didn't feel like moving. He just didn't feel like exerting the energy to do anything at all in this cell. He was even beginning to verge on apathy to the point that he didn't want to leave the cell at all anymore.

Sokka lay flat on his back, his tanned skin smoother now that it was not being split daily. Ridges lined his back from various instruments' past doings, and there was a thin white line right down his cheek. Scars of all shapes and sizes were all over his body. Sokka wondered if he looked like some sort of circus exhibit, deformed and weakened and unrecognizable. After all, there was no way to see himself.

Damn and blast. Wasn't there a way out? What if he tried climbing?

Well, he'd find a ceiling, and that would accomplish absolutely nothing. Sokka's blue eyes crinkled in frustration, and he placed his hands over his eyes, shutting out what part of the cell he could see.

Then, suddenly, a voice came. "Out of my way," it ordered in a strangled tone. Sokka's heart leapt strangely. It was Azula. She sounded mad. Extremely mad.

"Sokka!" she demanded, storming inside and slamming the door. "Who is better at firebending – me or my brother?"

Sokka scoffed. What sort of a question was that? "You, and you know it," he said.

"Yes, I know it!" yelled Azula. "Then tell me, why would my father choose my brother to go and try once more to conquer the Water Tribes?"

Blue eyes focused on her, but she didn't realize quite what she had said. Her rage poured from her in waves of steaming heat. She was so angry, she was shaking.

"I don't know," Sokka murmured, his heart racing. Suddenly, he was lost in reverie. He was lost in remembering his home, and, in what was a gift of providence, the face of his sister, which he had not been able to recall for months.

And that was all she got from him. Azula seethed at him. "You have no idea? You have no theory, asinine as it may be? Nothing to throw at me this time? Has so much really changed in a few weeks? This is important," she told him. "This is the conquering of the last -"

Azula stopped in her tracks. Sokka could feel her go cold, could feel the pulsing waves of warmth stop immediately as she realized what she was saying, and to whom. She swallowed, putting herself into a perfect picture, knees straight, head held high. She closed her eyes, scarcely believing her own idiocy. The Water Tribe was Sokka's home. Of course he would shut down like this. Of course she could suspect nothing, or less, from the guy. Azula shook her head, her soft black hair swaying gently in front of her pale, gorgeous face.

"I apologize," she said, the words not coming easily from her mouth. She did not apologize, although with Sokka she found she had started making a habit of it. "I… I didn't think."

Sokka got up from the ground, swaying. He had grown another inch or so. "Azula," he said tiredly, "am I ever going to be let out of this cell? Ever?"

Azula didn't see why he couldn't be let out after a while. It was a bit depressing to spend the rest of one's life down here, but it was her ability to lock him in here that still kept him under control, so she said, "Probably not."

His face hardened to steel. "Then why should I care about my people? You have stripped me of everything I have. Why should mentioning the place I was born and its imminent capture – why should that affect me at all?"

"I don't know," Azula replied smoothly, "but it does. You're never very good at concealing things, Sokka."

"I know," Sokka whispered fiercely, staring at Azula. "I know I care, because this is wrong. This shouldn't be happening, Azula. Can't you see that even if the Water Tribe were captured, it would be at the price of everyone dying or elimination of my culture?"

Azula was quiet for a moment. The Fire Nation was the most powerful and glorious of the nations; that was obvious. She was about to comment on the fact that the Water Tribes were comprised of savages, but for once, she caught her blunder before it happened. As for their culture… it was interesting, certainly, even if it bore no merit whatsoever. And Sokka himself was living proof that it was not just savages that lived there.

Suddenly, something very new and different happened. The door swung open and three guards ran into the cell, panting frantically. "Princess," the smallest gasped, "disaster."

"What? What is it?" Azula spat at them. Sokka had forgotten exactly how cold her voice could get. Catching their breath, the guards straightened up. The small one said, with the air of impending doom, "Princess… I don't quite know how to say it. Zuko has deserted. His room is stripped bare."

Azula's jaw tightened, but only Sokka noticed. Her words were nonchalant. "Well, that was hardly unexpected. Excellent; does that mean I, Ty Lee, and Mai are in charge of the invasion, as we should be?"

One of the guards swallowed visibly. The small one said slowly, "Ty Lee and Mai are… are not here either. They've left the royal palace."

The guard to his left added helpfully, "With all their belongings."

At this, there was a long, deadly silence, and the Princess' entire body tightened. "Leave me," she whispered icily.

"But, Princess," interrupted the small man. Azula looked at him with the incredulity of pure scorn, daring him to continue. Startlingly, he did. "What… should…"

Azula screamed through clenched teeth, "Do you think I give a shit? LEAVE ME ALONE!"

They left as quickly as Sokka could blink. The warrior sighed. He was about to witness the temper tantrum of the century, and he was standing right behind the firebender about to deliver it.

Something happened, though, that he never thought would.

Azula's voice started again, but she wasn't saying words. She was sobbing gently. She nearly sounded like a little girl. Her shoulders shook. Her whole body shook. Her crying became more and more frantic, and suddenly wails of distress started to intersperse the noises.

Sokka put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. He tried again, to no avail.

But he had been in this situation before, with Toph, and he knew how to handle it, as hurt as he might get in the process. The Water Tribe boy slowly took the last step to close the gap between himself and the Princess of the Fire Nation, and he painstakingly reached up both his hands, turned her, and encased Azula in an embrace.

She was clad in her usual light armor, so her metal shoulder-plate dug into his pectoral, and the corner of the breastplate scratched a line of blood onto his upper abdomen. He hadn't been hurt in quite a while, he mused; he'd gotten used to the comfort. But other than the armor, it was astonishing to Sokka how like a regular girl Azula felt. He didn't know what he'd been expecting – a machine clothed in skin? A porcupine?

At the moment, though, nothing so vile. At the moment she was a fragile, warm human body with soft hair and pale skin, frozen in hurt that was no fault of hers – well, maybe a little – and she was left friendless. She needed a friend. Was Sokka a friend? Maybe. He couldn't even tell where the line was anymore. It had been broken so many times that it might as well not have existed at all.

The Sokka of two months ago would have finally smiled grimly and said that at last they were equal, but this Sokka he was at the moment did no such thing, and didn't think of doing so. He merely felt pity for the girl he was holding, even more so when her thin arms slowly, questioningly closed around his back and he started to feel her tears slide down his chest. So this was the Fire Nation's pride and joy?

Right now, though, she was his pride and joy, because this emotion was the one thing he had managed to achieve in eight months of nothingness. Each of these tears was his. It was his duty to safeguard them and their source.

Azula's shuddering slowed down until it finally eased to a stop, and Sokka slowly patted her back. She composed herself, stepped back from Sokka mechanically, and looked up at him.

"I could have you killed for touching me," she said, but she sounded so miserable that Sokka didn't even bother to reply. He assumed it was more to reassure herself of her own power than anything else, anyway. "Why would you do that?" Azula asked.

Sokka sighed. "You were crying, for god's sake," he muttered awkwardly. "What else was I supposed to do?"

"I was not crying," Azula sneered, and it was nearly comical how much she seemed to convince herself of it by those words. The redness in her small nose simply faded away, leaving her as beautiful and pristine and composed as she ever had been.

Sokka's blue eyes stared into her gold ones, searching for the humanity he knew was there. "Okay, Azula. You weren't crying. But that doesn't change things. Your best friends are gone, and your brother is missing. What does lying to yourself even do in this situation?"

They had circled around each other.

The guards had left the door open. Sokka was mere feet from it. He stared at the princess for a second, a crazy second, not knowing why he would hesitate to sprint out as fast as he could.

But that moment passed, and the boy's long legs propelled him through the door into the first true light he had seen in a while.

Heart pounding, Sokka glanced over his shoulder. He saw the red figure darting out of the cell and towards him. His brain raced. He couldn't outrun her, and he didn't even know where the hell he was, so he had to come up with a plan.

Sokka's eyes shot frantically from left to right, searching for anything he could use to aid him. His gaze fell on a half-open door, and he was struck with an idea.

Sokka slowed down, just enough so that she wouldn't notice.

As he heard her steel-toed boots clicking frantically just behind him, he veered to the right, grabbed the edge of one of the doors, and swung it backwards as hard as he could.

There was an echoing thud and a cry of pain.

Sokka turned around. The princess lay on the ground, seemingly knocked out. A gash on her temple as well as a rapidly swelling wound in the same area bore testament to Sokka's door-swinging ability.

The look on her face was frozen, and it was one he could not identify. He slowly walked backwards towards her, knowing that he ought to be running, knowing that he should just get out as fast as possible. But his body ignored his instincts, and he knelt down beside her just as her face twisted back into life.

With a scream of rage, Azula spun an inferno of flame from the braziers lining the walls. Sokka yelled in pain as it struck his back, sending him sliding down the marble floor.

He looked up and her hand was dragging him by his hair back to his cell. His face contorted in pain as he felt a clump of hair leave his head; she had thrown him back into the sand using his scalp.

Strangely enough, she didn't try to stop him when he stood up. She just said, "You think I'm lying to myself?"

He nodded briskly.

The phrase seemed to have struck a nerve. Azula approached him, as slowly as a creeping panther, her eyes mesmerizing and glinting with coldness. Sokka's bare back touched the stones, and Azula still advanced, looking at him from under her long eyelashes and her hips swaying as if she were some twisted mockery of a geisha. But Sokka knew that look. He knew it very well, and he suddenly found himself paralyzed by fear, his sanity shrinking back into that box into which he had been locked for so long. He tried to control his breathing. He tried everything. Nothing worked. He was completely pinned in terror, the cold rocks behind him digging uncomfortably into his back.

"Lying to myself?" Azula whispered. "Why would I want to lie to myself?"

"I don't know," Sokka said nervously. She was standing mere inches from him now, her pointed face looking up into his. He flinched as Azula reached up and placed a small, pale hand on his chest. It was warm and her touch was light. Sokka stared, bewildered, at her.

She slowly slid her hand up his chest, up his neck, until her fingertips brushed the side of his forehead and her palm was resting gently on his cheek.

The crazed look had gone from her eyes, replaced by one of the utmost unconcern. Her other hand found its way to his forehead, brushing back his matted hair from his face.

"Are you sure you don't know?" she said.

"Sure," Sokka murmured, and jumped as her index finger lightly brushed over his lips. One hand grasped his shoulder, the other slowly caressing his face. Azula stood on her tiptoes, leaning in until her red lips were practically on his ear, tickling it with her words.

"Why would I want to lie to myself when I'm the only person I can trust?" she said in a slow voice. Sokka frowned. The words didn't fit what she was doing at all.

Oh, fuck.

"INCLUDING YOU!" she suddenly screamed at point-blank range into his ear, and the sole finger that rested on his chest suddenly glowed white-hot. Sokka was too stunned to yell. He merely staggered back when Azula hit him as hard as she could across the face with the back of her hand. The ear she had shrieked into rang, and rang… partially deaf and bearing a black burn right over his heart, Sokka sat down hard in the sand.

Azula stuck out two fingers and wheeled her arm backwards over her head, creating a glittering spiral of lightning that blasted into Sokka. "I can't believe you!" she shrieked as he convulsed on the ground. "I thought you had honor! I thought you were like me!"

"I… told you… I'm… not like you," Sokka hissed, his teeth clenched in absolute anguish. His body jerked as the last of the lightning left it reluctantly.

Azula seemed not to hear him. She walked quickly over to him, lifting her right foot and sinking it into the sensitive muscle right under the side of his ribcage. Sokka finally screamed, his vision blacking in and out completely involuntarily. "I thought I could trust you!" she shouted, her furious voice resounding around and around and around and around the room… Her sloppy firebending was being unleashed on the room, on Sokka, on everything in sight. "I thought I could trust you with…"

She knelt down next to his face. Her eyes glittered with fury. "With me…" she finally finished in a broken voice. She raised a glowing, heated hand, and ran it down Sokka's bicep. He shuddered and gasped as he felt his skin blistering and popping beneath the heat. His frantic sobbing earned him no respite.

Azula straddled his midriff, tracing her deadly touch across his collarbones. "I can't trust anyone," the girl grunted as she punched Sokka across the face, letting the heat fade from her fist. "Not Mai." Punch. "Not Ty Lee." Punch. "Not my own goddamn parents." Punch.

And she leaned down once more, her face right up in front of his, his broken nose slowly dripping blood. She slowly took her thumb and wiped the blood away with it. Her smooth skin felt nice cleaning his sensitive upper lip from the warm, wet blood dripping from his nose. "Not even you. You're nothing, and I can't even trust you."

Her slanted eyes and sharply pointed eyebrows relaxed for one brief second. Azula swallowed. She was about an inch away from him.

Sokka closed his eyes as he felt her lips gently press against his. Her mouth was smooth and dry and as the kiss lasted longer and longer, he wondered briefly what she was thinking. But he was more focused on the fact that for just a brief second, he was not in pain.

She smelled like smoke and tasted like defeat. His hand was on her cheek. His rough, shaking hand was slowly tucking her hair behind her ear. She let out a tiny, wrecked sob onto his lips, and he responded by kissing her harder. Keep away the pain… anything… to postpone what she would…

When she pulled away, she looked heartbroken. Her mouth, which had been so soft under his, trembled. And then she took her fists and she took her fire and she took her fury and she beat him senseless, leaving with a slam of the door.

Yet Sokka realized that even as he lay broken on the ground, unable to move and barely able to breathe, it was not she who had managed to break him. It was he, Sokka, who had finally broken her.

* * *

"I hate not riding Appa," Toph grumbled. "Much as I love flying, you know, I gotta say this sucks worse." They walked down a golden beach on some generally nondescript island.

Katara sighed, casting a glance at Aang, who was hobbling along at a pretty speedy pace considering he'd only been awake for a month and a half. "I hate the Fire Nation," Katara sighed. "Do we even know where we are anymore? I can't read maps."

Aang groaned. "Seriously? Shit!" he said. "All these stupid islands don't make sense at all… I wish there were just signs, like, "Capital this way! Capital that way!""

Katara laughed. "Yeah, that'd be great. But seriously, it feels like we've been to every freaking island in this stupid country already."

Toph asked, "Is there some way to see where the right place is from above?" She waved vaguely in the air. "Like, with subtlety?"

"Subtlety? Not going to happen," Aang snorted. "You know Katara."

He shot her a cheesy smile and Katara rolled her eyes, stepping into the water.

Her nimble fingers made a sort of upwards whipping motion and suddenly she rose on a column of ice, high into the sky. "See? What'd I tell you?" Aang mumbled.

Seconds later, Katara was lowering herself down breathlessly. "It's over that way! There's plated gold on the roof of the palace. I could see it!"

She and Aang guided Toph onto a large piece of ice, and Katara navigated them through the water. For the first time in a while since they'd been wandering around the Fire Nation, she felt a little hope that they'd find her brother.

Katara just hoped no one had seen her stunt with the water.


	6. Fall from Grace

**Thank you guys for your fabulous reviews! I really appreciate the time you took to help me out. =D Oh, and by the way, get ready for a crapload of history, all at once. It doesn't explain absolutely everything, but bit by bit, it all will come together. More on Zuko later. He'll work himself out.**

**-Speechwriter**

After that, there was torture. A lot of it. So much of it, he didn't remember it stopping once – just a continuous stream of new kinds of pain. But now? This was worse.

It was bad. Sokka knew it was bad. He didn't know for sure how long it had been since he had eaten, but his emaciated body couldn't do much at this stage – it was starting to eat away at his muscle mass. Sokka could feel gaunt gaps where his cheeks used to be. The hunger was a raw ache, throbbing with every weak movement.

At least he had water.

Sokka began to get extremely scared. It was a sort of escalating panic that built up over, again, he didn't know how long. But with every second that passed, he could just imagine himself starving to death, and for the food connoisseur, it was not a good fate. Or, at least, he used to be the food connoisseur. He used to love meat…

The boy, lying on the sand, gave a wry chuckle. He used to scarf down the food like it would never end. Well, now he knew how that felt, for sure – the food running out. Everything running out.

Sokka relieved himself on the wooden door, getting a small comfort in the possibility that they might have to touch his piss. As if that were any small revenge for what he was going through.

He collapsed on the sand again, looking up at the walls and then lying his head on the grit beneath him, his neck muscles simply not strong enough to support the weight of his skull.

At some point while he was asleep, she came in. He woke up and instantly knew she was there. He didn't quite know how, but he knew even before he turned to look at her.

Spirits, she looked a mess. She was always so perfect-looking that this was a complete makeover. The bags beneath her eyes gave her a harrowed look, and she wasn't wearing her usual make-up. Her hair was down in a messy bun – no royal topknot today.

She snorted as he rolled over, opening his eyes feebly. "Save yourself the misery," she said coolly, and snapped her fingers.

Two men walked inside, one grabbing Sokka's arms, the other his legs. Azula made some sort of motion, and they carried him forwards. Sokka was helpless to answer, merely staring at the ceiling as it flew by, borne by the guards' quick march. They were going down the hall from which he'd tried to escape, turning left, going up the stairs – two winding staircases, now three. Sokka, practically comatose, felt like throwing up from the spinning view.

He was wildly disoriented by all the lights around him. After so long in the dark, it wasn't a pleasant surprise. It was painful. To see anything, he had to narrow his eyes down to slits. His long, lank hair was sitting over his face, but he just couldn't summon the energy to move it away. He managed to slur, "Where am I?"

"Don't you worry your pretty head about that," Azula muttered in a voice full of foreboding.

"Where… am I going?" he asked.

Azula looked at him, disgust etched all over her features. "How about you don't speak?" she suggested with casual cruelty in her tone, and then she wasn't looking at him anymore.

Actually, the guards didn't seem to be paying attention, either.

The ceilings here were very high. Very high, red, gold and black. Detailed. Columns.

Sokka let out a weak noise of pain as he was dumped unceremoniously onto the black marble floor. He managed to sort out his tangle of limbs, his mind working sluggishly.

Finally, he lay face-down on the floor, just wanting to go to sleep after all that jostling and these lights and -

He heard a cry. A female cry. But it was not Azula's voice he was hearing. Sokka slowly raised his eyes, squinting into the half-darkness of the room. He couldn't really see anything.

"Move him," Azula ordered, and the two guards roughly hauled Sokka to his feet. He didn't even try to walk, so they dragged him across the floor until he was being held right in front of a girl. She was very tan, with very dark hair, but she had blue eyes. That was funny, Sokka thought. He didn't think they had blue eyes in the Fire Nation. Next to her, there was a shorter girl, who was very pale, with grayish eyes, and between them was a boy – maybe six feet? Shorter? Sokka couldn't tell, because he was being held limp, so he was slumped over.

The boy had strange arrows all over his body, and his head was shaved. Now, that was weird. Very odd indeed. Very… very strange.

Sokka blinked, turning back to Azula, with all the strength he could muster. "What is it?" he croaked, and the tan girl in front of him gave a great strangled sob. Sokka looked at her like she was crazy. Her hands were clasped over her mouth as if something dreadful had happened.

Then again, Sokka thought bitterly, seeing someone in this state was probably not pretty. This girl was probably disgusted by him.

The girl reached out a hand and gently brushed his hair away from his face. Sokka sighed under her soothing touch. Then he saw that all three of the peoples' feet were chained together. He wondered briefly what they had done to anger the Princess. Princess Azula, pride and joy of the Fire Nation.

Azula smiled. She could taste victory in her mouth as Toph, Aang and Katara stared at Sokka – and he was a sight to behold. His hair reached his shoulders, matted and greasy, and his face seemed hollowed out, like someone had taken a spoon to his flesh. All his bones stuck out unnaturally, and the scars he wore seemed exaggerated in the light, some ropy, some smooth, some blackened, all decidedly dramatic. And he couldn't even move.

Azula sighed inwardly. She sort of felt the absence of the old Sokka, the one who would listen to her and then reply in a manner that was completely uncouth to the royal family. But as she looked at the Avatar, the waterbender, and the blind earthbender, she knew that she had won. Finally, she had won. Everything would go back to how it should have been… how it should have been ever since…

Azula warded away the thoughts, keeping supreme nonchalance on her face.

Katara turned angry eyes on Azula. She was brimming with tears, and her voice was choked and nasal. "What have you done?" she whispered.

Azula sighed and rolled her eyes. "Honestly, what does it look like I've done?" she asked. "Use your imagination. I did." Her lip curled as she remembered her training; over the last month, it had increased threefold. She had to shut out everything weak. Everything.

Katara seemed to go insane. Azula stepped back as the girl hurled herself at the Princess, flailing about wildly. "You crazy bitch!" Katara screamed, her eyes filled with lunacy, and Aang slowly placed a hand on her upper arm, trying to pull her back, but Katara only strained harder, falling gracelessly on the ground by the place where they had laid her brother.

"Sokka?" Katara whispered in his ear, grappling with the floor as if to pull herself closer to him. "Sokka?"

She slowly started to cry. "My brother…" she whimpered, her voice cracking.

Azula suddenly felt a pang, as she said that. A pang of envy at the simple phrase. And even as she felt it, she realized how ridiculous it was – the Princess of the Fire Nation, jealous of a peasant from the Water Tribe?

"You'll be sorry for doing that to him," Toph said angrily.

The trio had let themselves get captured on purpose. No one knew about Toph's metalbending ability, so if they played their cards right, they could get out with great ease.

"Sorry? How?" laughed Azula, and Toph lifted her left foot, stamping on the ground to bring a column of marble flying towards Azula.

Instantly, the Princess assumed a stance and sent a tiny whip of flame, not at Toph, but to lash at Sokka's back. He groaned and convulsed, and Toph yelled out in horror, stopping her bending instantly, leaning against Aang in immediate shock. "Oh gods," she whispered. "Don't… not him…"

Azula said, "Any more tricks like that, and you'll get to see what our training sessions were like. Isn't that right, Sokka?"

She nudged him with her boot, and he shied away like a wounded animal.

Aang stood in stoic silence, matching Azula's poker face, but he couldn't believe what Sokka looked like. This was not the same guy they had lost nearly a year ago. This was something else entirely.

Katara had managed to stand up. "He's going to die," she told Azula forcefully. "I hope you realize that. He only has a few more days."

"As if I could care less," Azula sneered. "I have new challenges now, and they're so delightful!"

The Princess eyed the three standing in front of her appreciatively. Aang swallowed.

"You can't do this!" Katara wailed, going berserk once more. "You can't!"

Azula considered it for a second. "Oh, but I can. Take them to their suite," she told the guards with mild amusement in her voice, and watched as the three captives were finally, at long last, taken into custody.

Alone, she let the icy expression seep slowly from her face. Azula was very tired. Very, very tired, and she didn't particularly want to train today.

She looked down at Sokka, beside her, and sat on the floor, turning him over until he was face-up. "Who was that?" he asked groggily, baffled, and the innocent look in his eye made Azula smile gently. It was like having a pet.

She said, "No one. Not anyone of importance."

Then she got a guard to help her take Sokka up to the palace proper, because she really needed a bargaining tool, and she wasn't about to relinquish one like Sokka. Especially not Sokka himself. So he could not die.

The guards dragged Toph, Aang, and Katara down the stairs, but they didn't throw their prisoners into just any old cell. The sturdy men led the trio down the hallway, talking to each other with no great subtlety.

"So, which ones did the Princess say to put where?"

The taller one replied, "The little girl goes in the cage, the other girl goes in the box."

They nodded to each other, and Toph and Katara exchanged uneasy glances. Toph briefly thought about just discarding their chains now and getting rid of these guards, but she knew that doing so would never get Sokka rescued. Azula would be down very soon to check on them, and all had to be into place to soothe the Princess' mind before they escaped.

Even so, Toph didn't like the words that the guards were exchanging.

And with good reason. It wasn't long before Toph was roughly lifted from the earth, hearing Katara gasp and cry, "No!", and unshackled. She felt truly blind as she was tossed into something hard. Hard and wooden. And she heard a door slam. Toph's hands reached up and groped blindly in front of her, and her fingers suddenly made contact with bars – wooden bars.

She was in a cage.

Katara's predicament was similar. They chained her inside a metal pen, her arms spread wide so that she couldn't move them, and her legs clamped to the wall. Katara's mind raced. They should have known better than to underestimate Azula… they should have known better. Of course she would have some way to know about Toph's abilities.

As for Aang, the guards pushed him to the floor and locked his limbs onto the cold stone floor, immobilizing his hands and feet before leaving.

There was shocked silence within the big cell. The three wanted to look at each other for reassurance, but found that there was none within the situation.

Toph spoke, finally, her voice soft and mournful. "Sokka," she said. At this, Katara forced down a cry. Her brother, the one who had always taken care of her, and the one who she had always taken care of in return, was gone. All that was left was that strange shell of a man, diminished in soul and in body, with the mournful blue eyes of their father. Where was the boy who had playfully joked around with his friends? Where was the guy who loved sarcasm and had practically made it an art form? Where was the guy who loved meat and all culinary delicacies? It was strange to think about – had he just vanished into nothingness? Was that part of him buried so far back in his brain he could not recall it?

Aang said, "I hope he's okay. I bet Azula was bluffing."

"I wish I could have been able to tell," Toph groaned, kicking at the floor of her cell frustratedly.

"Maybe we can get out of this," Aang muttered, wiggling his fingers and toes experimentally. Unfortunately, bending was an art, and that art required the correct focus from every part of the body. The way they were chained, bending was nearly impossible. The best Aang could manage was a feeble flutter of wind around his wrists. "I bet if I do this for long enough I can get out of here," the airbender said optimistically.

Toph crawled towards the bars, reaching her skinny arm through the bars of her confines, but she was just a tiny bit too far away from the stone ground. "Maybe," she replied to Aang, sinking back into a sitting position, "and maybe if some rock somehow got in here we could bust out."

"Just… just shut up," Katara suddenly burst out. "We're trapped here, okay? And my brother is… gone."

There was a terrible silence in the room. Aang slowly closed his eyes. It was not a good time to try to reason with Katara.

He had to open his eyes again, though, because whenever he closed them he could only see Sokka's painfully marred face, his blank expression, and the injuries smothering his emaciated body.

Sokka looked around with wonder. His eyes had adjusted to the light, and he now marveled at the beauty that surrounded him from all sides, the silk and velvet, the marble and polished granite, the precious metals everywhere, the glorious fires burning brightly from every wall… He swiveled his head on his neck in great effort to look at Azula, who was striding in front of the guards.

As if he weighed nothing, the guards lifted Sokka up three flights of stairs. They emerged onto a hallway, one side of which was open to look out over the courtyard, the other side of which was lined with rooms. Sokka wondered briefly what those rooms were for, and wondered if maybe the girls and the boy from earlier were staying in these rooms, too. That tan girl had said that he was her brother, but he found that almost preposterous. He didn't remember having a sister.

Sokka dismissed the trivial thought and eyed the rooms suspiciously. They looked very comfortable, and compared to the cold, wet sand he had been living in, they looked like little segments of heaven.

His feet and back were beginning to ache from the unevenly dispersed gravity pulling at him. He was so used to lying prone for every part of the day… Also, he was aching all over from the hunger, as usual…

When the door to one of the rooms opened slowly, he took in a little more breath than usual, unable to gasp fully. These must be his Princess' quarters, Sokka assumed, and they were as beautiful as she. The light chiffon bed-curtains shielded a huge four-poster bed with countless plush pillows. The lush red rug covered most of the dark wooden floor, which had a matching desk, which was impeccably neat. Azula's room also had a massive chest of drawers, wardrobe, and cabinet filled with various weapons. A low, red sofa sat under a fire nation banner on her wall, and a door was open on the other side of the room, leading to a luminous bathroom.

Azula slowly sent points of fire to the torches in her beautiful room, motioning for the guards to leave. They dumped Sokka on the floor and shut the door behind them.

"This is my summer room," Azula said apathetically. "I don't like it as much as my autumn room."

Sokka didn't say anything, but only looked around the room like an idiot. Azula rolled her eyes. This was so unfulfilling. As he convulsed, dazedly trying to move, the Princess remembered that he was in a state of extreme starvation, and pulled a white porcelain bowl filled with grapes from her desk. With one arm, she pulled Sokka over to the sofa, managing to lift him onto it. He seemed practically stunned, but as she forced food into his mouth, he awoke violently, voraciously eating everything he was given, practically inhaling it.

"You're not supposed to eat so much at once," she told him, putting the bowl where he could not reach it. "Not during recovery, or whatever you call this."

Every doctor in the palace had told her to do the same thing – take him from his cell, feed him, and let him live in comfort. Otherwise, he had only days to live, just as that Water Tribe girl had said. And he really could not die, because Azula needed him desperately for her plans that had yet to be acted on.

Next, Azula picked him up – this wasn't difficult; he was extremely light – and brought him to the bathroom, running some water into the bathtub. The boy managed to navigate himself into the tub, pawing gently at himself, removing what seemed to be pounds of sand and dirt from his hair and body. Azula slowly handed him a bar of soapstone, which he rubbed weakly onto himself.

Azula sighed. Watching him so weak was incredibly depressing. She missed the one of before, the one who would still glare at her with hatred after three hours of burns. This docile creature was infuriatingly peaceful in everything, weak and floundering.

She hoped his spirit would return swiftly, or else she might get frustrated and throw him back into that cell.

It was odd seeing the blood and muck off his face, which was quite regal. His high cheekbones and thick eyebrows framed his stunning blue eyes, which were now filled with childish meekness.

Azula jumped as he reached for the scissors sitting on the side of the bathtub. Her hairstylists used those to cut her hair, and she nearly snatched them out of his hands before she saw that he was very methodically snipping off locks of his greasy, dangling hair.

Slowly, the mass of darkness hovering around his face fell away, replaced by a short, simple hairstyle with two locks of hair falling over his forehead, the rest hovering around ear-length. Surprised by the fact that he remembered how to cut his hair in Water Tribe fashion, Azula took the scissors away from him.

He looked like a real person now. Azula was almost disconcerted at the dramatic change, but at least the boy didn't reek of stale urine and sweat anymore. She stopped the water, pulled Sokka from the tub, and laid him back on the sofa, where he instantly fell into sleep once more.

Azula pulled down her hair, running her fingers through it. She would visit the other prisoners tomorrow, and her plan would be put into action.

As she got into bed, she cast a furtive glance at Sokka, who looked like a newborn curled on the red velvet, and she swallowed, tasting the unfamiliar and unpleasant taste of acrid guilt.

The Princess awoke, her eyes opening to see Sokka standing next to her dresser, calmly eating the grapes she had been giving him the day before. Azula sighed, pulling herself from her bed. Within minutes she was fully dressed and prepared for another day, although it was not yet dawn. She was confused as to why Sokka was awake, but satisfied herself with the likely response that his internal clock had been completely disrupted by the stay underground.

"Sokka," she said sharply, and he looked up at her. "Go back to sleep."

He swallowed the grape he was eating, put the bowl back down, and nodded, sitting down on the sofa and turning over. Azula sighed and locked the door before leaving.

She went down to the courtyard for an hour of pre-dawn training – a warm-up, really. Nothing that even Zuko couldn't handle.

At the thought of her brother, Azula seethed. Spirits, she hated him. Constantly whining about his position in life. Well, now he'd really blown it – it had been a fortnight since he left the royal palace, taking Azula's only friends with him. There would be no return for him, even after his supposedly 'ingenious' plan of temporarily joining the Avatar proved moderately successful. Azula snarled, unleashing a line of blue flame directly in front of her, flipping twice to roll it into a ball, and dispersing it. If that plan was the best her brother could come up with, it was truly sad.

No. The sad thing was that it had been met with a measure of success. After Zuko's seven years of unsuccessful hunting, Azula had given up on him. She was the one who had always been the golden child, after all. She deserved all the birthright that Zuko had claim to.

Azula had been in on every scheme her father had ever had, ever since she was ten. He could talk strategy with her, because her nimble mind understood everything the Fire Lord could throw at her. Then, the comet didn't arrive, and things started going wrong.

It had been predicted that at the end of summer, exactly a hundred years from the start of the war, the same comet that had begun the war would aid the Fire Nation in ending it forever. Azula's father had constructed a massive fleet to destroy Earth Kingdom forces permanently, waited expectantly… and had been disappointed.

It had been a huge blow. Ozai stormed back to his chamber and would not see anyone inside it for three solid months. Except, of course, his daughter. His ever-faithful daughter.

She had convinced him that everything could still go according to plan. They just had to make finding the Avatar their first priority. After his capture, everything would fall into place.

Azula was right, of course, as usual. Unfortunately for her, this put her brother in a crucial position. He was hot on the Avatar's trail, as he had been for a while before that. The Fire Lord started pouring funding into Zuko's mission, considering it blindingly important, and yet Zuko managed to do nothing. For a year after the comet neglected to arrive, and then two, the Avatar evaded every capture. Zuko had a small fleet of ships under his command, and he failed. He failed miserably.

Azula's pleas to take over the mission fell on deaf ears. Ever since the comet, her father had seemed just a bit off. His fever to capture the Avatar consumed everything, and he started pushing her away. His daughter was no longer his tactical advisor, his partner-in-crime. She was no longer anything more than a tool to him. Despite her begging and reasoning with the Fire Lord, he would only put more and more power in Zuko's hands, without seeing that he could clearly do no good at all with it.

So then Zuko came up with the idea – infiltrate the Avatar's group, teaching him the firebending he had never had the time to learn. It took a long time for the group to get used to the idea of his joining them, or so said Zuko in his regular reports to the Fire Nation army. They didn't trust him for a while. But after a few months, Zuko assured them that the Avatar would soon be the Fire Nation's greatest non-issue.

As if.

Azula knew he would somehow mess things up, and so he did. She was afraid that his idiot troops would kill the airbender by mistake, thus starting the reincarnation cycle somewhere buried in the Water Tribe. That was very close to happening, she learned – but Zuko's efforts did yield this Water Tribe boy. Years of planning. Years of tactics, and years of her father's slipping away from her, little by little, and all she got was this peasant from the Southern Water Tribe. And after the betrayal?

Zuko arrived home to the greatest pomp and circumstance Azula could imagine, as if this simpleton peasant were such an incredible victory. Azula still remembered the smug look on her brother's face as he walked off the ship. She could have done twice what he did, in half the time, with no resources. As it was, her father refused to hear anything against his son.

And now, this business with the Water Tribe's conquering. Now that Zuko had left with no warning whatsoever, Ozai was incredibly out of sorts. The Fire Lord assumed that his son had joined his uncle, who was with a known resistance force buried in the heart of the Earth Kingdom. Ozai's increased paranoia made him constantly unsettled and readily making faulty decisions, but Azula could say nothing upon fear of execution.

She could only hope that her father would see her as the obvious choice to lead the attack against the Water Tribe. Then, after her victory, things would be the way they should have been. The way they were meant to be. She would have her father's love.

Azula cursed the spirits. She had overrun her practice time remembering everything that had happened to put her where she was now.

She brushed her ebony hair back into place and walked into the palace, swallowing. She was about to visit her father for the first time in a week.

The large doors creaked as she pushed them open. "Father?" Azula said, walking forward with her eyes downcast.

"Azula," sighed the figure behind the flame. "My only daughter. My child."

She knelt before him, keeping her eyes on the floor. "I come to ask about the invasion."

"The invasion of the Northern Water Tribe," murmured Ozai. "Yes, yes. I thought about this for many hours last night."

Azula swallowed silently. There was a pregnant pause.

"The invasion has been postponed," Ozai choked out, sounding almost surprised to hear the words coming out of his own mouth. Azula's mind went blank with fury. "Yes. I regret to say it, Azula, as you would have been my first choice to lead it. You are strong."

Azula's brow furrowed. That was just incorrect; Zuko was his first choice. He had made that clear long ago. What was he talking about?

"We need to focus internal strength," Ozai continued, "as well as strength of our Navy. The blow from the Resistance threw us into a hole we haven't dug ourselves out of for nearly a year now."

"Yes, Father," Azula said, her smooth voice silky and clear. She was waiting for him to tell her to get up. He always told her to get up, not to kneel. Always.

"Internal strength is vital at this point," her father rambled. Azula didn't think she'd ever heard him speak so aimlessly. "Yes, only when we are strong from the inside can we be invincible on the outside."

Azula's brain suddenly jerked the pieces together, and it was all she could do not to burn something. This was all Zuko's fault. By leaving… he had ruined absolutely everything. He had ripped his father's trust, and that was not something easily won.

"We are strong," Azula reassured Ozai, still half-waiting for the order to stand.

Ozai huffed an audible sigh. "Your brother was not. He was weak. I knew this the whole time. I knew I should have entrusted the mission to you, Azula. Every mission."

Azula resisted the urge to agree. She just wanted to leave. She felt sick. Sick and angry. Sick. And angry. And resentful. And she knew the order would not come. He was not going to tell her – not today – to stand, to be his equal.

It was humiliating.

"Lock the doors when you leave," Ozai told her suddenly.

She could not do so fast enough.

In the end, being perfect didn't even matter. Not if it couldn't get her what she wanted.

**Apologies for this chapter being sort of a non-entity. Doesn't really stand by itself at all, which is disappointing even by my standards, ahaha.**

**Anyway, tune in next time for something less shitty.**

**~SW~**


	7. Deceived with a Smile

**Enjoy.**

* * *

Sokka looked at himself in the mirror. It had been a week and a half since he had been dragged up from that dungeon. The hair on the top of his head, dark and soft, was tugged back into a wolf-tail at the back of his head, with the sides shaved. His face was still far more angular than he could remember, although a steady diet and regular nutrition had removed the gauntness. Now his defined cheekbones and strong brow lent his tanned face a stately, noble appearance. The thin white scar on his cheek hadn't faded. That and a crooked nose were the only immediately apparent remnants of his torture.

He couldn't remember much before the starvation – in fact, he could barely remember the starvation – but he distinctly remembered that it was nothing like what he had now. Every day, he had everything he wanted. He could stroll around the royal palace completely at ease, dressed in his customary red and black outfit. His body, which had been so deprived of everything before, was quickly getting back on its feet, figuratively and literally.

Slowly, Sokka brought the razor to his face, trimming away the stubble that lined it. He rinsed out his mouth with cool water and spat it into the basin before him, walking out of his bathroom into his own room. It was nowhere near as decorated as Azula's, but it was spacious and comfortable, and Sokka rarely spent much time in it, anyway.

He emerged into the hall, looking over the rail at the courtyard below, where Azula was trailing lightning around her nimble body as if it were an extension of herself.

Every day, Sokka looked up at the sky, which was a gorgeous blue, and admired its beauty. Every day, he appreciated his release from the hellhole down in the dungeons. That was the only place he wasn't allowed to go, but he would never go there by choice, anyway, so it was not a major loss.

Sokka's feet padded softly on the stone as he made his way down the hall to the narrow staircase. He took a seat and watched Azula appreciatively as she ran through a stream of exercises that would have exhausted anyone else, but barely made the princess break a sweat.

She finished the string of moves with a huge blast of lightning, and Sokka cringed a little. Lightning was great and all, but did it have to be so loud? And painful?

He could feel his mind slowly repairing itself day by day along with his body. His memory, unfortunately, didn't seem to be part of the healing process, but he kept discovering parts of his subconscious that he didn't know were there, such as an ability to make witty repartee on the spot and incessant references to meat. He wolfed down meat – and any food, really – as if it were about to fling itself from the plate in front of him.

Although he considered Azula a friend, as well as someone he respected and admired, he never really fawned over her like everyone else did on a constant basis. He treated her as he treated everyone else in the palace – with warmth, humor, and kindness. Sokka didn't know why he didn't have the same fear of the Princess as everyone else seemed to possess, but he didn't think the lack thereof was a bad thing for him or her.

A couple hours every day, Azula would go down to the dungeons and cells below the palace. Sokka didn't think much of it – after all, she said she had to interrogate people, and Sokka assumed that a questioning process that took so long had to be important in some way, so he didn't bother Azula by asking.

Azula snatched a hot towel off the plate of one of the servants nearby and wiped her brow, tossing the towel back onto the servant's face. Sokka rolled his eyes – Azula seemed to get some sort of juvenile pleasure from treating everyone around her like mud.

She walked over to him. "Enjoy the show?" she said in her cool, regal tone.

"I've seen better," Sokka scoffed, and laughed as she punched him, not too lightly, in the bicep. "Have you eaten?"

Azula shook her head, sighing nonchalantly. "I heard that the cooks are making flaming fire flakes today. I hate them – peasant food, really."

"Peasant food, huh? Sure…" said Sokka, wondering about what these fire flakes would taste like.

"Yes, so they should be perfect for you," Azula shot back.

Completely ignoring the jibe (which he didn't really understand, anyway), Sokka nodded in agreement. "Well, if they're edible, they're probably perfect for me," he said with a white grin on his tanned face. He was missing a tooth – he didn't exactly know why – but it was the tooth right behind his upper left canine, so it wasn't very visible. He ran his tongue over the smooth, rubbery gap curiously. "Come on," he said suddenly, and raced towards the kitchen, where a band of cooks stewed food furiously.

The kitchen, as usual, was in semi-darkness, punctuated by flares of flame from various stoves. It was extremely warm and filled with shouts from the head chef.

Sokka was in the kitchen so frequently that he knew most of the cooks by name and most of them knew him. The head chef even took time out of his yelling to say, "Hello, Sokka! Good morning, Princess!"

Azula shook her head, saying, "They address you before they address me? I think some changes need to be made around here."

Sokka laughed. "Calm down, it's just because I essentially live in this room. Now where are those fire flakes you were talking about?"

Azula guided him to a huge vat of the flaky substance, which was literally flaming. Every few seconds, a chef would firebend the fire from the food, only to relight it.

Sokka looked very appreciative. Azula never looked appreciative, but she didn't look displeased.

Azula had not forgotten how Sokka had tried to escape, and she didn't forgive. However, she did try to suppress that memory as much as possible, as Sokka didn't seem to remember a thing before the two weeks he'd gone without food.

He reminded her a bit of Mai – she could tell him to do things, but there was no guarantee it would be done. However, quite unlike her depressed friend, Sokka neglected to do so not out of apathy but out of free spirit. Everything he did, he did with exuberance, from practicing with various palace weapons to conversing with servants to studying in the library.

Azula had removed any books with pictures or descriptions of Aang from the library. If something triggered his memory, then he would remember all his hatred for her, and with every passing day, the eighteen-year-old girl realized more and more that she didn't want that to happen.

No matter how much disdain she poured on him, he just absorbed it and returned a fresh, borderline-cocky, utterly sincere attitude to her. Before, Azula had used him as a sort of speaking wall to bounce her feelings off, but now she didn't even know what he was. She supposed he was her friend, though on a conditional basis. If he ever found out what she had done to him, his family, his friends…

Sokka was a stubborn, hot-tempered guy. If his amnesia faded, he would try to kill her, and she would have to kill him.

* * *

"You realize what she's doing, right, Aang?" Katara murmured. Her voice bounced off the walls breathily. "She's trying to get you into the Avatar state. You can't go into the Avatar state. Close your eyes, hum, do whatever you can – you absolutely cannot go into the Avatar state. Do you understand me?"

"Yeah," Toph added irritably. "I know she's a huge bitch, but Katara and I are strong. Azula's not going to dare touch you, just in case she accidentally kills you or something and then the Avatar gets reborn. She's just going to torture the people closest to you."

Katara sighed, "That's us."

Toph nodded. "And if she manages to get you into the Avatar state, that's when she'll kill you."

Aang swallowed. "I get it. I understand. The cycle will end. But Toph – I can't – you get it, right? I can't just lie here, listen to you guys being tortured, and keep myself from being angry."

"I know it's hard," Katara said, "but just remember – we'll be alright. Azula's not going to get rid of us after she's worked so hard to get us here. And maybe at the next full moon you and I will have a chance to get out or something." She looked glumly at her chains, secretly doubting there was a way to get out of this place, but she had to remain optimistic. For Aang's sake. For the world's sake.

As if on cue, the sound of steel-toed boots echoed around the hall. The wooden door creaked open, and Azula's figure slowly lit the torches, casting warm light around the cell. She shut the door, her ruby lips allowing themselves a small smile, and looked at the three people she had waited so long to have under her power.

Azula almost regretted what she was about to do, but she absolutely had to dispose of the Avatar as a factor. The boy was only sixteen – he was weak and emotional. Hopefully, Azula wouldn't have to hurt either of the girls too much before he broke in.

"How's Sokka?" Katara burst out, quite surprising the Princess.

Azula instantly developed a brazen lie. "The same, essentially. I've lightened up on his treatment and fed him, so he's alive."

She paused for dramatic effect. "But just barely."

The angry snarl on all three of their faces was nearly identical and almost shocking, but Azula could detect the slight differences. There was a note of relief in Aang's anger, because although he was livid at her supposed treatment of Sokka, he was glad that the boy was alive. Azula nearly rolled her eyes. Optimists.

Katara's anger was righteous, unsurprisingly, but also had a strange motherly quality to it, as if she were unable to protect something that could not fend for itself. But the strangest was that of the blind girl. Toph's face was contorted into such rage that Azula was nearly surprised that she was not just smashing through the bars. Suddenly, she realized – this sixteen-year-old girl had a crush on Sokka. She had romantic feelings for him.

Another plan formed in Azula's mind. What if she were able to elicit the Avatar state without hurting anyone at all? What if her psychological skills were so great that the boy could not resist his anger triggering the reaction? It would be an interesting challenge, if nothing else.

"So, your brother – what is he like?" Azula said coolly, walking over to the waterbender, whose cold blue eyes met her amber ones levelly. "I've never really known him outside the context of incredible pain," the Princess laughed lightly, looking over a shining fingernail. In her peripherals, she could see Katara's hands ball into fists and her mouth part to reveal bared teeth. Azula frowned. How… savage.

She had ceased to think of Sokka as savage a long time ago, but this girl had something very primal about her that reminded the cultured and educated Princess of the Water Tribe's background. Azula looked up innocently into Katara's eyes. "You're not going to tell me? That's such a shame. I suppose I'll tell him that his sister has forgotten about him. He remembers you now, by the way. He finally remembers his sister."

Katara swallowed and her eyes filled with tears. She fixed her gaze on the wall opposite her, refusing to look at Azula anymore, refusing to respond. The waterbender remembered, distantly, Zuko muttering, "Azula always lies", in his sleep. It became Katara's mantra.

Azula walked over to the wooden cage in which the earthbender sat.

"Don't waste your breath, sweetheart," Toph said lazily. "Pretty much everything out of your mouth is a lie, so don't bother trying to psychobabble me into being angry."

Azula chuckled softly. She squatted down on the stone tiled floor, leaning close to where Toph sat, her back against the wall. Her voice was uncomfortably close to Toph's ear as she said, "I bet you miss him."

She was impressed. Toph showed no emotion at all. No tightened jaw, no eyebrow movement. Nothing. She pressed farther. "I bet you miss him every day. I suppose you dream about him. Perhaps you once thought that the two of you had a future together…"

At that, Toph's blind eyes snapped eerily towards Azula's face, only a little off the mark. "Shut up," she growled. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course, I don't guess either of you will be seeing much of the other," Azula sneered. "Oh, and I guess if you were to see him, you wouldn't recognize him that well. Since you last saw him, his physical appearance has changed quite a bit. Though, I guess, since you're blind, you've never really seen his face or anything." She sat down on the stone, thinking about Sokka. What about him would make Toph the most sensitive?

"He still has the same voice, though, when he screams. Same muscles as before, to an extent, although malnutrition does to terrible things to a man's physique, unfortunately." Azula stopped, eyeing Toph carefully. The girl seemed to be shaking slightly. "He still has the same blue eyes, though. Strong eyes. Quite beautiful."

Toph's breathing became shallow, and her hands were so tightly closed that Azula could see a drop of blood forming at the edge of one fingernail where it dug into her palm. Bullseye.

"Especially when he cries," the Princess finished, and Toph snapped.

"Shut up!" she screamed, flinging herself at the bars, grabbing onto them so hard that her pale skin displayed the veins behind them. Her grey eyes streamed tears, and tiny streams of sobs flowed from her throat. "Just… just…"

"I could tell him you said hello, but I'm sorry," Azula told the crying girl, "he doesn't remember you. Odd, really. He remembers the Avatar, over there, and the waterbender. Why wouldn't he remember you?"

Azula felt a pang as she said the words. Seeing the usually stoic earthbender in such abject misery was depressing at the least.

Toph sank to the floor, curled up into fetal position, and cried despondently. Azula turned back to the other two people in the room. Katara looked absolutely horrified, but Aang looked vengeful.

Azula walked over to Aang and knelt by him, putting her face over his, upside-down. "What's wrong, Avatar?" she said silkily. "Something getting you down?" Aang stiffened. Her breath smelled fresh and clean. He felt like it should smell like blood.

"You're evil," he hissed. "You're… there's something wrong with you."

Azula laughed quietly. "At least I'm not dying, alone and in pain." She stood up, and added as an afterthought, "Like Sokka."

That was enough for one day, Azula decided, and left. She felt a certain pride for being such an excellent manipulator, but there was that uncomfortable knot in her stomach that told her that she never wanted to do it in the first place. Hopefully with further hammering the Avatar would prove as weak as she hoped.

* * *

"Azula!" Sokka called from the entrance to the foyer. She looked down from the sweeping marble steps at him. He was running towards her, but he wasn't wearing his typical loose black pants, black leather shoes, and fitted red chest armor, with the sleeveless black shirt underneath. In fact, he was shirtless, and wearing cropped red pants. Azula frowned.

"Do you really have to drip sweat all over the palace?" she sighed disdainfully. He looked as if he had just run a long distance. But she eyed him approvingly – the scrawniness of not so long ago was completely gone. Sokka had lean muscles on his narrow torso, toned arms, and a healthy glow to him that lent his body a strangely magnetic appearance. Azula blinked. She didn't feel comfortable looking at him, for some reason, which was odd, because for most of the time in the cell he had been practically naked.

"Oh, come on, Azula. I was going to ask you for some lessons!" he whined, putting his hands on his knees and panting breathlessly. "You know, since you're so good at doing things and stuff."

His lack of articulation was endearing. "Okay, fine," she mumbled. "What sort of stuff?"

"Just things with weapons. The Sergeant in charge of the weapons room says I should learn how to fight with a real sword. Cool, right?"

"Of course, Sokka," Azula replied with a smile. "Just don't be offended when I smash you into the ground in defeat."

"Oh, I won't be," Sokka said cheerfully. "I mean, I'm just starting, after all. This is going to be great. Thanks, by the way."

Azula tossed her hair and let out a small 'hmf' noise. "No problem," she said. "I suppose my schedule can fit you in."

The tan boy grinned and beckoned. "Come on!" The Princess followed him down a string of hallways to the armory, looking at Sokka's back and then away every once in a while.

"You should really put on a shirt," she said with distaste once they were standing outside the armory door. Sokka looked at her and gave her what was unmistakably a sleazy smile.

"Why? Distracting?" he asked in a weirdly sultry tone. Azula's face screwed up into a mix of horror and disgust.

"What?! No – it's – just open the door," Azula spluttered. "Spirits, I should fry you for that. Your insolence… is -"

Sokka chuckled and pushed open the door. "Sure, sure, Azula. Whatever."

She would have thought that he would respond to her threats, not push them away as if they were nothing, but oh well. Perhaps he had forgotten completely about how she had abused him. Azula wondered exactly how much still remained in his brain about what had happened.

"I already picked out a sword," Sokka said, pointing to a gorgeous weapon with a glimmering white steel blade and a black hilt.

Azula chose a plain steel sword with the royal crest emblazoned on the pommel. "All right," she said. "Let's do this in the courtyard."

Sokka was excited – he'd never been allowed to touch the swords before, and having one in his hand was thrilling. Azula slowly settled into a stance, her legs crouched far apart, her torso facing him but her legs facing the side.

"By putting yourself into this stance, you minimize the attack area your opponent has," she explained, straightening up. "Go ahead and try it."

Sokka was surprised at how easily his body slid into the exact same stance she had just shown him. Azula was a bit surprised, too, given her expression. "That's right," she said. "Now, there are a lot of different maneuvers that one can undertake with a sword -"

She stopped. Sokka was slicing his sword around, and by the expression on his face she would have thought that he was just playing around. He was actually, though, doing a series of detailed attacks and feints that Azula had learned several years ago called the Xi Lang Defense. Azula frowned.

"What is it? Keep going, I'm listening," Sokka said, putting his sword back by his side.

"I think this might help more," Azula said, and decided what she was going to do.

She sprinted head-on at Sokka, raising his sword. The boy automatically raised his own weapon to defend himself, and Azula turned, twirling around to attack at his side. Sokka raised himself onto the balls of his feet, spinning and blocking her sword.

He didn't know what was happening. All he knew was that Azula was attacking him, and he managed to be fending off her every blow, even getting in some of his own. His brain was just dissecting her movements, triggering a respective countermovement for each one that seemed to be embedded in his mind. The glittering steel of her weapon flashed in front of his face, and he batted it away with a sort of twisting movement he couldn't remember a second after it happened.

Finally, Sokka started thinking clearly, devising a plan in his head. He feinted backwards, swung around his right shoulder, and ducked as Azula's blade swung over his head, sticking the point of his sword right up near the hilt of her sword. As he stood, he twisted his arm clockwise, sending Azula's blade flying from her hand.

She wasn't breathing too hard – she was too in shape to be exhausted by a ten-minute spar. However, she did seem a bit flustered and more than a little astounded. Sokka lowered his sword hesitantly.

"I guess I was trained with swords before getting here?" Sokka reasoned. Azula shrugged.

"As if I would know everything about you," she said. "But I would think training was obvious, in this situation."

Sokka felt a bit awkward. "You're not mad, are you?" he asked, his eyes darting around uncomfortably.

Azula laughed. "Why would I be mad? If this were an actual duel, this would be the part where I shoot you full of lightning and call it a day."

"Riiight," Sokka said, heaving a sigh. "That's good. I mean – well, not good, but – yeah."

Suddenly, he dropped his sword. An image suddenly blossomed in his mind's eye. He clenched his eyes shut to keep the picture fastened on the back of his eyelids. It was a gray-haired man, stern-looking, holding a sword with a dark blade. He was very tanned, and stood outside a magnificent house. Sokka's mouth drifted open. This was the first thing he remembered… about anything…

"What? What is it?" Azula demanded sharply, suddenly nervous. What if he had just recalled everything? His eyes opened.

"Nothing – I just remembered this man," Sokka muttered. "Really tall and tan, with a big house and a sword. Oh, and gray hair…"

Azula couldn't figure out who it was from the description, but she sighed a sigh of relief. He didn't know. He still didn't know anything.

The pair walked back to the armory, where they hung up their weapons. "Well," yawned Sokka, "that was interesting. I'm hungry again. Let's go get some dinner."

Inside, though, his mind was reeling. He was some sort of expert swordsman. Why would he be so great at swordplay? Was he secretly an assassin or something? Was he part of the Dai Li? He'd read about them – the secret police of Ba Sing Se. But no, they were all earthbenders as well as expert weapons wielders… and Sokka couldn't bend at all.

He snuck a glance over at Azula and wondered how much she knew about his life. Quite a bit, probably, and more than he did, certainly. He would have to get it out of her somehow.

How would he know it was the truth, though? He knew some plain facts about Azula, and they were that she was practically a pathological liar, that she was incredibly ambitious, and that she wasn't close enough to him to tell him the truth, probably. Sokka cursed inwardly and swallowed. He needed to get that information. He absolutely had to find out about himself. He knew he was nineteen – that was one of those instinctive things he had retained, which was also why he could write and speak, incidentally.

But what about everything else? What about his friends? Family? As time had worn on, everything had faded up until that first day he woke up in Azula's room, incredibly hungry. He couldn't remember anything up to that point, not even the day before that… He couldn't remember how he'd gotten any of his scars, though they were numerous. The one on his face, his crooked nose, the angry red scar tissue bunched up on the right side of his rib cage, the three parallel lines on his back – there was no end to the list.

The cell haunted his dreams, but his dreams betrayed nothing else. Sokka often woke up in a cold sweat after a dream about his cell, feeling cold and alone, sobbing. Where was he even from? He had never even seen anyone else who had tan skin, let alone blue eyes. No one until that vision of the tanned man today – but he was dressed in Fire Nation clothes.

Without memory of home or self, Sokka felt lost, as if he were floundering without an identity at all. He wondered why Azula hadn't told him anything about his past. Was there something she didn't want him to know? He looked at her again, but couldn't fathom that she was concealing anything. Then again, she was largely unreadable. Every time she turned her amber gaze on him, it seemed to be warmly, not cynically, as she looked at everything else.

Sokka knew that she hated her brother, who had left the palace, taking her two best friends, Ty Lee and Mai, with him. That was common palace knowledge. Less commonly known was Azula's secretly harbored resentment against her father for his lack of foresight in nearly every issue since the comet didn't arrive. Sokka had been reading up on history, so he knew a lot about previous Fire Lords and about the Avatar's disappearance over a hundred years ago.

Sokka wondered a lot if he was from a different country. He knew airbenders were extinct, but the Earth Kingdom was huge, and there were probably people who looked like him somewhere. There were also the Water Tribes, primarily at the North Pole, but that option seemed unlikely to Sokka for some reason. He didn't really like the cold. But Sokka hoped he was from the Fire Nation, because as far as he was concerned, it was a good home, and he didn't want to be on the enemy side in the war.

He wondered what it was like to fight. Moreover, he wondered what it looked outside of the Fire Nation. Or, well, the palace. Sokka had an unquenchable curiosity overborne only by a goal or plan, and right now, that goal was to uncover himself, piece by patchwork piece.

Sokka and Azula ate dinner in relative silence. She seemed preoccupied, but Sokka had his own problems to worry about. By the end of his roast possum chicken, an exotic imported dish, he had decided to find out, somehow, his past, from Princess Azula.

He had to be sure that she would tell him the absolute truth, though… How could he ensure that? They would have to be closer for that to happen. And he would have to find about more about her…

Sokka sighed.

* * *

Toph had sobbed for almost an hour after Azula left the room, despite Aang and Katara's efforts to calm her down. It was strange, crying here in the dungeon of the Fire Nation's palace.

After she had stopped and subsided into hiccups, Aang started talking aloud to depressurize the atmosphere. "Okay. Katara, I think I have a plan. When was the last full moon?"

"I think there was one a few days before we got captured," Katara sighed, "so I guess there'll be another in two weeks or so…"

Aang nodded, or as much as he could lying flat on the ground. "Okay. So I can do just a little bending with my hands – these metal things aren't very tight on the ground. I've got about a half inch of give. So Toph, I need you to teach me how to bend metal, and then I can bang my way out of these cuffs and get us out of here. We'll break out at the full moon so Katara can bloodbend."

"I don't know, Twinkletoes," sighed Toph. "Teaching you is hard enough without me not being able to show you anything. I can try explaining, but I don't know if you'll be able to do it in just a couple weeks. Remember, I've been a master since I was about eight, and it took me four more years to even discover metalbending."

"It'll work," reassured Aang. "And then I can get you guys out no problem. Can you start explaining, maybe?"

Toph sat down, sniffing dejectedly. "Okay. Well, the first thing you've got to understand is that water, earth, fire and air are all completely natural elements. Metal, on the other hand – especially the metal you're gonna have to bend, in those restraints – that isn't natural. It's man-made. So it's been basically corrupted into little segments of pure earth surrounded by all this carbonated, fused shit that you're not going to be able to bend."

Aang nodded. "Right. So basically, I'm only going to be able to bend part of it, but I'll use that part to manipulate all of it?"

"Exactly," Toph said. "Okay. Don't get psyched out by this, by the way, but I know you had trouble starting to bend rock, so you have to know this. Metal is ten times tougher." She smacked her lips and shook her head. "And without me to actually demonstrate any of the moves I've come up with, you're going to have to throw away all that wimpy technique you love. I know you're doing really well with earthbending, but you're still better when it's not direct, head-on stuff."

Toph didn't usually like talking too much, but she found talking about earthbending easy. "See, you love working with earth like it's water – all those moves where you cycle your arms and stuff. But it's not water – and metal is even more not water. You've really got to pack some punch."

"The first thing you've got to do, I guess," Toph mused, "is use the rock below you to get what real earth feels like, and then try to find it in that metal. Not that you don't know what real earth feels like or whatever, but there's a certain… texture to the purities in the metal, and that's what you have to find to bend it. And you'll have to be damn accurate, if you're going to try and bend with, like, your wrists and fingers only. It'll probably be good to meditate beforehand, so let's go ahead and do that."

She closed her eyes and breathed in time with Aang, thinking about what a shame it was that he couldn't just breathe them out of there. He had already tried blowing a gust of wind over to his hand to control it, but his fingers couldn't control a big blast, and a big blast was the only thing powerful enough to have any effect.

Toph sighed and let her resentment go. This would work. Aang would learn metalbending in the process, and once they were out they could recover Sokka.

"Katara," Toph said suddenly. Aang continued his meditation as Toph and Katara spoke quietly to each other.

"Yeah?" Katara answered, her voice still a little stuffy from her crying.

"Our mission has got to be to find out where Sokka is," Toph said. "When we get out of here, we have to be able to be as fast as possible. We can't just look around the palace for him. If he's in a cell down here, we should be okay, but if he's somewhere else…"

Katara nodded. She tried not to think about how Sokka had last looked, and tried even harder to forget Azula's words, but they just wouldn't fade, no matter how hard she tried.

* * *

**Dude, each chapter has been longer than the one before. Woohoo!**

**Please drop by a review if you enjoyed. Or, hell, if you didn't enjoy. Whaaatever.**

**Thanks,**

**Speechwriter**


	8. Spin

**Little Zhuge Liang – thanks for your review, but I just want to make it clear that the use of 'purities' was not a misspelling or a misused word. Aang is going to have to find the pure spots (purities! :D) in the metal that he can bend. I don't mean to patronize or anything; I think there may just have been a slight misunderstanding, and I don't want people to get confused as to what he's bending or not bending (in my mind).**

**Actually, on the same note – the only basis I have for this metalbending technique lecture is the part in the second season where Toph, like, feels up her metal cage and it shows little shining bits of something buried in the metal. I assumed that those were the pure parts of the metal that were the earthiest and she was using those to manipulate it all… I don't know, just a perspective. :D**

**And I know I haven't really taken the time to say this, but thank you so much to all my incredible reviewers. Your constructive criticism is adored and believe me, I take every word into account, although I may not use every suggestion, or answer every question. Thanks a million for your input and your encouragement.**

**Enjoy the chapter, homies! I hope it isn't OOC… ergh, it was exceedingly difficult to write.**

* * *

Sokka sat on a long, red sofa in the library, his back pressed comfortably into the lush velvet. He was reading about history – since he couldn't remember his own, he might as well investigate others'.

He looked up as the door to the library creaked open. Azula's small figure made its way inside. "Azula!" called Sokka cheerfully. "Look at this – you're in this book." He grinned cheesily as she walked over to him to see.

"That's odd, I don't recall telling any author they could – Oh, Sokka, that's terrible." Azula shoved him with a scowl. He was pointing to a picture of an extinct manatee warthog. Sokka burst into peals of merry laughter.

"Oh! Ha! I kill myself sometimes," he hooted with joy.

"Wish you would," muttered Azula, although she couldn't help but enjoy the sight of him having so much fun over such a silly joke. "Anyway, I was here to talk."

Sokka sobered up some. "You okay? What's wrong?"

"Well, nothing I know of, exactly," Azula answered uneasily, pacing slowly around the library. "I'm just worried about my father. He hasn't spoken a word to anyone in a week. They send in the plates of food and they come back empty, but he hasn't given orders or held meetings or anything."

Sokka frowned. "That doesn't sound like him," he muttered. Azula had told him stories about how her father pored over every detail of every attack of every battle endlessly, sticking closely to the unofficial family motto – "If you want a job done right, do it yourself." Not giving orders was entirely out of character.

"No," Azula agreed. "It's not like him at all. I asked to see him, but he wouldn't even acknowledge that I knocked on his door. I don't dare go in, because that would be incredibly disrespectful, but I am worried. I feel like Zuko's leaving has weakened him significantly, and this isn't good for the Fire Nation."

She sighed and sat down at a dark wooden table, looking morosely at the spread of books that Sokka had laid out to read eventually. No one in the palace really used the library – Azula had already gone through most of the books, and the servants were not allowed inside. It had become Sokka's second most frequent haunt, after the kitchen, of course.

She put down the book she was holding, got up, and went to sit on the sofa next to Sokka, putting her elbows on her knees and her face cupped in her hands. "I just want the best for my country, of course, and I can't do a thing besides wait."

"Waiting isn't always terrible," Sokka said. "I mean, I was just reading about the different jing – there are 85, really, but three main ones, and one of those is neutral. Waiting. It's an important thing to do – you know that. You've just got to wait this out. It'll pass – the Fire Lord is an incredible leader, and I mean, if he cares about the Fire Nation like you do, I'm sure things will go back to normal soon."

Azula smiled wearily, sitting back in the sofa, her hands on her thighs. Sokka always had the exact right thing to say to her. She looked up at him, some of the stress in her face streaming away. He smiled gently and put a dark hand on her own hand lightly. She restricted the reflex to attack brutally, but it was strange. No one ever touched her without her permission. His rough hand was cool and reassuring and dwarfed her own.

Then Sokka groaned and leaned back in the sofa, putting both his hands behind his head. Azula looked away, swallowing awkwardly, trying to ignore the hand-touch that had just happened. She didn't like the lack of impersonality that had invaded the relationship between herself and Sokka. Things like that touch were starting to become commonplace – a light brush on the shoulder, playful shoving… It nearly made her think of how it would have been if she'd had a brother she didn't despise.

She never really had friends – even Ty Lee was more afraid of her than close to her, and Mai hung around her for lack of anything else to do. Sokka lacked that lethargy, and also didn't seem to have Ty Lee's fear of getting burned, and this courage to Azula was both commendable and intriguing.

Back when Azula had been sent, however briefly, to infiltrate the Earth Kingdom capital and capture the Avatar, she had been furious that Ty Lee would abandon their friendship to do something her parents were planning to forcibly remove her from anyway. This was furthered by the fact that Ty Lee was always a bit of an undisciplined show-off, which irked Azula to no end. She managed to manipulate the acrobat into coming anyway, but it was hard knowing that she had had to go to such extremes.

Then at the Boiling Rock, Mai let her obsession with Zuko surpass her loyalty to the Fire Nation – and then she and Ty Lee had betrayed Azula. That scar had not fully healed, and though the two of them had come back to live at the Royal Palace after the comet's failure, their relationship was even more strained than it had been before.

As for her brother, after she had told their father that he had killed the Avatar, Zuko told him otherwise during the eclipse, coward that he was. After being yelled at by his father for a significant amount of time, Zuko had knelt down and begged forgiveness, promising to renew his efforts in the chase. The Fire Lord had, for some reason, agreed, and entrusted Zuko with an aircraft with which he renewed his search, and then her brother was off again, inspired by his father's apparent forgiveness…

"Azula," Sokka sighed, and Azula snapped out of her thoughts.

"Yes?" she said, sending a little ball of flame orbiting around her thumb. He didn't reply. "Well, what is it?"

The fire sputtered out and she looked at him expectantly.

He was trying to figure out how to word the question so that he wouldn't offend her. "I'm just wondering why you… why, you know, you're so mean to everyone."

Sokka could see the outrage fill her face. Her eyes widened and her eyebrows closed in a tight 'v' shape. Her mouth drifted open in disgust.

But, upon considering it, Azula mused, it wasn't that preposterous a query. After all, she was rather cold to … well, everyone, really. It was true.

She weighed the benefits of telling him the truth and placed them next to the detrimental factors. Massaging her temple with a great sigh, she decided to finally tell him something that she had never told anyone in her life.

"Well," she said, straightening herself up regally, "First you must swear on your honor that these words never leave this room."

"Sure," Sokka declared. "Fine."

Azula started to feel a little apprehensive. What if –

No. She had to quash doubts from her mind. Always.

"Well, you might know that I'm a prodigy."

Sokka laughed. "Well, that was an anticlimax."

"Quiet!" she ordered, slightly irritated. "And you know that my father has always been proud of me for being so." Azula paused. "Well, that's not entirely true. I've been practicing the art since I was two, and it was even evident then that I was skilled far beyond my years. My father decided to give the personal trainer to my brother and undertake my own training himself."

She was quiet for a second, thinking about what to say next.

"Well, first you have to understand the reason I can firebend with blue flame – it represents the coldness I feel when I execute the bending. My father taught me that firebending is not a gift, or anything to be praised and accommodated. It is an art, something to be learned and used. The impersonal way I learned how to bend is why my flame is so harsh and without the proverbial warmth of regular flame.

"My father is not proud of me like he should be – that is, proud of another person, proud of his child. He is proud of me like I am something he has created – and in a way, he did create me, I suppose." She started playing with the ball of fire again, rolling it around her hands in a quick pattern. "He started my training with intermediate-level firebending, not the basics. Once they discovered I was an alleged prodigy, he thought, I suppose, that I should be able to do anything.

"Intermediate firebending is not easy. It involves leaps, flips, acrobatics – aerial attack is largely covered in intermediates. I was only three or so at that time – my body was that of a tiny child. It's not supposed to be physically possible for a child that age to do those exercises.

"But every time I tried a move and failed, my father would demonstrate it correctly."

Azula averted her eyes, swallowing miserably. "Unfortunately for me, that demonstration would be aimed at me."

She snuck a glance at Sokka, biting her lip. His face was the picture of revulsion. "Your father aimed firebending attacks at a three-year-old?" he whispered in near-disbelief.

Azula muttered, "You've seen what he did to Zuko – is it really that hard to believe? In any case – I learned to fend for myself. He threatened me with punishment if I ever let my mother see my burns – or anyone, for that matter." She shook her head, looking up at the ceiling, tears prickling her eyes. It was painful to remember. She blinked away the tears, humiliated that they had even dared to make an appearance.

"Father demanded more and more from me, until the slightest imperfection was practically treason. I would steal my mother's face creams, because I found that they healed burns remarkably well. That was how I learned to steal, and luckily, skin that young peels and doesn't scar." Azula looked down at her arms, slowly rubbing the smooth skin with her delicate fingertips. Back then, she had covered those arms so that no one could see the red, angry marks.

"Ty Lee taught me some things like cartwheels and flips, and she would laugh when I couldn't do the same things she could – but I wasn't amused, because if I couldn't do those things in my lessons, I would be disciplined. Heavily. I spent every moment of every day devoted to my training so that I could sleep without bleeding on my sheets, and when I did happen to get blood on them, I washed them out secretly in my bath so my mother wouldn't know."

"My mother," Azula choked. "I wanted her approval too, but there was no way to please both her and my father. The bipolarity I would need to do that was impossible for a young child – as cold as ice for the Fire Lord, but a regular, happy child in front of my mother? I couldn't… I couldn't do that. She thought something was wrong with me." Azula's nails curled into her fists. "And if she ever asked, I could tell her nothing except that my lessons were going well, obviously. So she coddled Zuko, giving me up as a helpless case. Yet another reason I despise my brother," she muttered.

She sighed a long, deep sigh. "The one person who values me only does so because he mutilated me until I was perfect in his eyes. Perfect at bending. Perfect at being an obedient servant." Azula twitched in retrospective disgust. "The perfect tool. I learned how to bend lightning when I was nine."

Looking at Sokka, she said, "Do you know how old my uncle was when he learned how to bend lightning?"

Sokka shook his head.

"Thirty-one," Azula spat angrily. "I was nine."

Sokka sat in absolute silence, just looking at her. She was sitting ramrod straight, her eyes fixed straight ahead, completely still, but Sokka could sense the pent-up energy in her. Her nostrils flared and she sucked in a deep breath, closing her golden eyes as her chest rose and fell. The quietness in the library was unnerving. The two locks of dark hair falling neatly in front of Azula's face were quivering. Sokka suddenly realized that the girl was shaking slightly, presumably from remembering her experience.

"I'm alright now," Azula breathed softly. "I'm the best at what I do. I just can't bring myself to feel… anything. It's too dangerous. If I feel emotion, I might get something wrong, and that would completely unhinge everything – everything I've – I've…"

She stopped for a second, her frantic stream of words cut off so that she could slowly compose herself again. "Everything I've sacrificed myself for," she whispered.

Sokka suddenly felt a huge rush of emotion overwhelm him, as if to compensate for what Azula could not allow herself to do. He exhaled without realizing that he had been holding his breath for a while.

As he looked at her, he felt like an invisible wall was constructing itself between them. But he slowly reached over and put a tanned hand on her shoulder, and with that, the wall crumbled. Azula looked at him. She looked almost sick, the absolute misery in her eyes dull and broken.

She stood, and he rose with her, almost ten inches taller than she was. The Princess did not bother raising her eyes to look at him, although his tender gaze didn't remove itself from her face. He slowly turned her body to face his and placed his arms around her back in a shy, unsure hug, surprised by her dainty figure. For someone stronger than he could imagine, she felt so breakable.

She tentatively returned his embrace, turning her face and pressing her cheek against his chest. Azula felt like a child, felt like when her mother had hugged her when she was young, empty of malice and just filled with pain. She didn't let herself cry. She wouldn't.

She felt Sokka's large, coarse hand reach up to her porcelain face and she held her breath. He slowly took her hair and tucked it behind her ear, holding the back of her neck delicately. His proximity was entrancing – under her she could feel him breathing gently, and as his thumb absentmindedly brushed the side of her neck, she almost felt shivers under her skin. Azula swallowed, closing her eyes.

He stepped back from her, his hands sliding slowly down her arms to hold her hands gently. Azula somehow felt overwhelmed by his constant blue gaze. She thought back to what she had said to the earthbender, feeling regret even more strongly now as she realized that it was true – Sokka did have beautiful eyes. Intense, light sea-blue, fringed with a contrasting navy, perfectly lined with short, dark lashes.

As Sokka held her hands, her warm fingers nervous in his cool grip, The Princess let her gaze trail over his face, down his slightly bent nose to his full, dusky lips. In the dim light of the library, his cheekbones lent him a refined appearance, and his thick eyebrows emphasized his strong brow. His hair, swept back into its tiny ponytail, was dark and soft. Azula closed her eyes slowly, turning away from him. He was so kind. If only he knew what she'd done… everything she'd done… maybe she wouldn't feel so completely wrong for being here, with him. Of course, if he knew, he'd be gone, and that would be just another person to hate her.

It was this thought that made Azula start crying, there, in the library, eighteen years old and solitary.

"Azula," Sokka said in a serious voice. She signaled for him to stop, but he kept talking. "Azula, you can do whatever you want to do. I mean, you're your own person – there's nothing to be afraid of. Your feelings aren't something to be ignored. No matter how much you try, they're not going to just fade away."

Azula wiped her eyes angrily, accidentally scratching her eye with one long nail. She blinked quickly, clenching her eye shut against the momentary pain, quenching it out. He was right. She knew that.

She had tried to suppress her feelings often enough to know that they would not obey.

* * *

Aang gulped. When Azula barged through the door, she didn't look composed at all.

"Are you ready, boy?" she said to him with a small, toothy smile. Then she turned to Toph. "How about you? Or you?" she snapped, whirling on Katara.

Toph stared blankly in Azula's direction. "Fine, then," Azula muttered, stepping towards Toph's cage, slowly taking out a wooden key from her pocket and opening the door. Toph hurtled towards the sound of the opening door, but Azula merely stood in her way and kneed Toph hard in the stomach as she attempted to sprint past. Katara made a choked noise as if she herself had been hit, and Aang closed his eyes tight, keeping his emotions squashed down where the Avatar state couldn't get at them.

He tried hard to block out the sounds as Azula's feet connected hard with Toph's small body again and again, the soft thump of Toph's form against the floor, the louder crack of her skull against the wooden wall. He started humming to block it out, though his eyes were streaming tears, but unfortunately, Azula heard him.

"What are you doing?" she hissed. "If you close your eyes or make a sound, I swear I will kill her."

"You wouldn't," Aang said in a low voice.

"She would," Toph breathed, and Aang looked at her. There was a large gash on her forehead already, surrounded by bright red swelling. "I believe in you, Aang. Just… don't think too hard."

And with that, Azula punched her in the eye.

* * *

Azula lay on her bed, running her fingers over the smooth satin sheets with a comfortable sigh. She was starting to feel a little confused, which was preposterous, because she was never confused, yet nonetheless…

Then again, the girl mused, she could allow herself confusion when it came to emotion, not being experienced or knowledgeable in the area.

Today, when she had hurt the helpless blind girl, it had not felt like she was just executing a training exercise. In fact, by the end, Azula had felt positively sick, and the worst part was having to pretend she was enjoying it for the purposes of the Avatar state. She admitted that the restraint that the boy was showing was admirable, but this was definitely bad. She would have to do that over and over, and the thought made her want to throw up.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, she was almost entirely baffled by the way she felt about Sokka.

After the events of earlier, in the library, she felt like she had given part of herself to him, a part that could so easily be taken advantage of… Everything she had told him was an absolute truth, which in itself was a strange new thing, but even stranger was the way she felt when he met her eyes over the table at dinner with a gentle readiness and a small smile, as if to tell her he didn't judge her. For anything. It was like something had sunk a hook into her stomach and jerked it around a little, not letting her brain focus correctly, making her sit up straighter and swallow in order to regain her composure.

And that? She had no earthly idea what that was. No, not at all. Worst of all, she had felt a hint of a blush creep onto her face, though fortunately she had managed to suppress that almost immediately. What was she, some sort of Ty Lee character, girlishly giggling over a boy?

Oh… was that it? Azula frowned and flipped over on her bed, blowing her hair out of her eyes in irritation. Was it that she… liked Sokka… romantically? She had never had the time or the opportunity to have romantic interests, so that would explain the complete lack of knowledge of what it was.

When she thought about it in the context of words, though, it seemed ludicrous. Azula was Azula. Azula did not need anyone or have a childishly present _crush_ on _anyone_. She tried to shake the notion from her head, but later, when she was soaking in her marble bathtub, she couldn't get rid of the idea, so she very rationally decided to mull it over. Purely from a scientific, analytical standpoint, of course.

Whenever she saw him, she wanted to speak with him. When she spoke with him, the conversation was natural and not contrived, even with her being her usual nearly misanthropic self. He didn't seem to care that she was a Princess, and though it should have irked her, she found his lazy devil-may-care attitude oddly… attractive?

Azula scowled, gazing through twirls of steam that rose from her bathtub. He was handsome, there was no denying that. He was very attractive. But then – so were many noble boys in the Fire Nation, though none quite like Sokka. All her potential suitors – who would start courting her once she was twenty years old, in hypothesis – were arrogant, spoiled, and substandard. Much like Zuko, actually. Very like Zuko, without the scar.

Azula snorted. If he had just used the face cream, like she had figured out at the ripe age of three or four, that scar on her brother's face might not be so terrible. She should have had scars on every single inch of her body. That was why she was strong – she was a survivor.

Azula's mind snapped back from slightly justifiable vanity to the issue at hand. Now that she thought about it, Sokka was a very viable candidate for her affections. He had strength, courage, talent, a work ethic – Agni knows he had a work ethic; he worked constantly – and didn't seem to mind who she actually was.

The kindness and stuff was irrelevant, although it was nice that he didn't take his station for granted. The only hiccup in his character was the fact that he couldn't remember anything more than two weeks past…

Alright, so perhaps she could see where it went from here. Objectively, of course. Nothing too involved or anything. Of course.

Sokka slowly hefted the blades in the armory in his hands, wondering if one of them had once been his. He assumed his would not be one of the ones with the royal insignia, but he felt like if he picked up his own blade he should recognize it. Sighing, he put back an overly fancy but mostly decorative sword, picking up a plainer steel one and holding it out experimentally.

"That one's too long for you," said a voice from behind him, and he exploded into motion, hopping into a sort of ninja stance with a preposterously comical expression on his face.

"Oh. It's you. Don't scare me like that," Sokka sighed, and Azula laughed.

"It wasn't exactly hard," Azula said, and Sokka shot her a glare, putting back the sword.

She walked up to him, looking at the huge rack of swords in front of her. "So, what are you doing in here? I thought you already practiced today," she asked slowly.

He shrugged. "I don't know, I just thought maybe a sword was in here I once used or something, and it would help me get my memory back. You know."

Azula sighed, "No, you didn't have a sword in that cell."

Sokka turned to her with a small frown on his face. "Hey, can I ask you a question? Why was I even in the cell in the first place?"

The Princess' face was perfectly relaxed, but suddenly her heart was racing. "I don't know," she said, putting on a face of mock concentration. "I suppose it was something petty, and you just happened to be within the palace area." She added a careless hand gesture for effect, but it felt contrived.

It was a passable enough lie, but the way she suddenly felt like jelly was unbelievably unsettling and new. What was wrong with her? It wasn't that big of a situation… One small lie…

Sokka's face fell. "Oh," he said. "So you didn't…"

Azula cocked her head.

"You didn't have anything to do with it? You don't know anything?"

She shook her head, feeling that strange quivering again, blood pounding hotly to her brain and away again. "No, I don't. I'm sorry," she said, hating herself for saying the words.

He looked at her composed face, which was filled with concern, a sad smile spreading across his features. "It's okay," he answered, and Azula gave him a smile back that looked genuine but was actually filling her with unease. Since when had fibbing given her this internal reaction? She felt disgusted with herself. How weak of her.

Though she supposed Sokka would encourage that weakness, what with this new campaign he had to make her open her emotions, or whatever it was.

"Let's do something," Sokka suddenly suggested.

Azula asked, "Like what?

"I don't know," the boy said, awkwardly scratching the back of his head. "An activity or something?"

Azula raised her eyebrows in amusement. "An activity?" she laughed. "Okay, what type of thing?"

Sokka sighed disappointedly. "I hoped you would come up with something."

The girl shrugged. "I mean, the Ember Island Players are in town…"

"What are the Ember Island Players?" Sokka asked. The pair walked out of the armory and through the palace at a leisurely pace, enjoying the warm temperature of summer.

"They're a traveling acting troupe," Azula answered. "I don't particularly like them, but you would probably find them amusing…"

Sokka grinned. This would be his first time leaving the palace grounds. "That sounds great! So, tonight, right?"

The Princess nodded. "I'll get us special box seats so that -"

Sokka waved her words away. "No! Let's just sit in the audience like everyone else," he said with a smile. Azula rolled her eyes but eventually agreed.

"We'll leave at sundown, then," she told him.

She waited until he had bounded away happily to smile at the joy in his blue eyes.

* * *

**Sorry for the wait and for the obnoxiously long author's note at the beginning. I'm not abandoning this story, though, so any reviews on any thoughts you might have to improve my style or the storyline would be greatly appreciated. Although I do have a basic storyline planned, essentially, input is fabulous.**

**Actually, reviews in general would be nice, of course. Ha.**

**Thanks,**

**Speechwriter**


	9. Coming Undone

**Just to warn you – the time frame sort of jumps around in this chapter. Don't take each segment to be chronologically in place.**

**Thanks for all your support and reviews!**

* * *

Aang woke up in a cold sweat and wild-eyed. Glancing around, he saw that Toph and Katara were still asleep, and that outside their single, high-up window, night had not risen into day just yet.

He rolled over, touching his arrows lightly. Sighing, he wondered how long it would take before he finally snapped and attempted to bend Azula into oblivion with the Avatar State. The day before, Azula had finally dared to lay a finger on Katara, the girl he loved, the girl he would do anything to save…

He had nearly gone berserk at that point, and had had to physically suppress the Avatar State, although the pure rage he felt flowing through him was threatening to ignite his arrows into a visible glow. Azula had turned around triumphantly only to find that Aang had thwarted her efforts once again.

Now Katara had a black burn mark on her left cheek, and every time Aang saw it, he felt sick.

When Azula was not there, however, Toph had been a good teacher of metalbending. Aang had spent so long meditating that when he closed his eyes, turned his head, and shouted at the metal encasing his hand, he could actually feel the difference between vibrations in the metal and vibrations in the earth buried inside it. He was getting to the point where he could reach his fingers down to grasp the metal and feel it slowly molding to the shape of his hand, however slightly. Toph had had to re-explain to him how the purer parts of the metal were weaker, so when the metal is wrought, the builders try to eliminate them – thus making metalbending nearly impossible for all but the best benders.

He figured they'd been trapped in there about a week, and Katara said she could feel her waterbending getting stronger again, so the moon was obviously waxing, and hopefully within a matter of days they would be able to get out.

Aang closed his eyes and tried to get to sleep again.

It seemed, however, that no sooner was he asleep than he was being awoken by the clang of the door. Toph and Katara seemed fully awake and a bright ray of sunlight was shining in through the window. From the deeper blue of the sky, it looked to be past noon, and Aang couldn't understand how he had slept so late. He blinked, trying to get his bearings, but Azula was already striding in through the door and unlocking Katara's cage. Aang's eyes finally lost their bleariness as the firebender raised two pointed fingers and swung them over her head, carefully keeping the lightning that suddenly crackled into existence at its neutral phase. Her lips drew in a half-smile as she pointed the fingers at Katara.

Aang screamed, "NO!"

Katara shut her eyes, waiting for the lightning to enter her body and shock her, momentarily pausing all her body systems with the pain.

Azula opened her mouth slightly in shock before the lightning raced away from her – in completely the wrong direction.

Aang stared. He had never in his life seen Azula do anything wrong. Katara's bright blue eyes snapped open, her breathing heavy.

Azula's face suddenly became furious, and she attempted the move again. This time the lightning appeared, but she could not even make a second motion before it raced upwards, cracking into the ceiling with a thump. Some rocks showered down from where they had been dislodged by the force of the lightning. There was a long, shocked silence.

Refusing to admit defeat, the Princess raised a hand with her blue fire in it, and the strangeness of the episode before was erased for Katara in immediate and excruciating pain.

Now Azula was mad, due to the lightning fiasco, and there would be no mercy. She slowly lit the bottom of Katara's fire nation dress on fire and stepped back. Katara's legs were spread wide apart so as to prevent her from bending her knees further or waterbending, but once the burning reached her knees, where the slit in the cloth ended, it would start burning her skin.

Azula took out something from beneath her robes – a waterskin. She had absolute control over the fire now.

The fire slowly consumed the blue material, sending acrid smoke up to Katara's face, making her eyes water and her nose itch. Suddenly, she could feel the burning in direct contact with her skin.

She screamed.

Azula's face set in grim satisfaction. Aang thought it had to be the most disgusting thing he had ever seen. He tried to look at the ceiling, tried to look away, but he couldn't rip his eyes away from Katara. As her face contorted in pain, Aang felt hot tears rushing to his eyes.

Azula doused the fire. Katara's tattered robes now only half-covered her thighs, and her knees were red and shiny with blisters and burns. As Azula's water trickled down her legs, it slid over the burns, and Katara hissed in pain.

Azula slowly lifted her hand again, and Katara's mind filled with dread. It was going to happen again, and she could not stop it. The inevitability made her fill with blind panic.

This time, Azula started with the bottom of her left sleeve, and before long, Katara's throat was raw from screaming. She didn't even notice when Aang started screaming with her.

Toph was suddenly glad she couldn't see this. She just wanted to get as close to Azula as possible so that she could kill her.

The water tribe girl was in too much pain to move, essentially, so Azula unlocked her padlocks. Katara fell to the ground without grace, grunting slightly as she hit the stone floor.

When the boot hit her stomach, she threw up.

Aang didn't know how he was managing to stay himself. His eyes and nose were red from sobbing, his throat was sore from his vicious screams, but the Avatar State stayed away… thank the spirits. He finally managed to rip his gaze from the spectacle in front of him, and as Azula viciously kicked Katara over and over, he could only hear the noises.

When Azula finally left, Aang looked over at the girl he loved. She was not back in her restraints on the wall, but was on the ground, her hands handcuffed, her arms chained to one of the bars of her metal pen, her legs bound by more chains and weighed down by a heavy ball. Her dress was now sleeveless, her arms and legs were covered with burns, and she was unconscious.

Later, Azula ordered their window to be filled in. The complete darkness was only interrupted by the one ray of light coming through the square window in the door. There was no way to tell the time anymore. Everything was lost in the dark.

* * *

Sokka pulled on his boots and rushed down the stairs, managing to fall flat on his face. He hauled himself back up, walking briskly to catch up with Azula.

"I'm so excited! I'll finally get to see what the city is like!" he gushed to Azula. She remained stony-faced.

He frowned and nearly asked what was wrong, but the silence was more dangerous than usual, and he sensed that it was not something that should be spoken. Instead, he continued to speak of his excitement, guessing that it would probably relax the Princess at least a fair amount.

They went out the front wall of the palace and Sokka looked around excitedly. The cobblestone streets spread out in all directions, and he could see rows of houses sprawling out to line them.

Instantly, six guards rushed to Sokka and Azula, carrying a palanquin. They knelt, and Azula regally ascended into it. Sokka awkwardly fell inside, feeling unsteady that he was being carried, and straightened up, peering at the Princess.

"Azula?" he said tentatively. "Are you alright?"

She was so distracted that he had to repeat the question. Then she looked at him with anger that faded into apathy. "Yes, yes. During training today, I got an exercise wrong. That's all."

"Oh," Sokka said, tapping his foot awkwardly. "Right."

Azula sighed. "I shouldn't care, but it is embarrassing. Anyway, any mistakes will be rectified soon enough, anyway."

Sokka nodded. He knew that Azula would probably be in a bad mood for a while, though, and with good reason. Her perfectionism was abnormal in its magnitude. Hopefully, though, this show would cheer her up.

The show was not cheering her up. Not only were the performers quite terrible, in Sokka's opinion, but the show, called The Boy in the Iceberg, was incredibly disjointed and didn't seem to make any sense whatsoever. Okay, the show was an original cast revival of the same one that had premiered three years earlier, so it couldn't be expected to be entirely up to standard, but Sokka was still disappointed in it. Also, he didn't really understand what was happening, because he couldn't remember anything that had happened three years ago.

"I don't get it," said Sokka. "Why was that kid in a giant block of ice?"

Azula swallowed nervously, but Sokka couldn't see it in the darkness of the playhouse. "I saw this play a few years ago, and I don't recall it making much more sense as it goes on."

A man in the row in front of them turned around and shushed them furiously. Azula lifted her hand, preparing to firebend him into oblivion, but Sokka put a hand on her arm. "We can just leave, if that would be better," Sokka suggested.

"You don't mind?" Azula asked.

"Of course not! I'd rather just see the city," Sokka whispered back with a small smile. Azula nodded, her body flooded by relief. She hadn't realized that the play the Ember Island Players were doing was The Boy in the Iceberg. She had assumed it would be Love in the Time of Dragons, as usual, and had been shocked. Azula didn't recall, from her last viewing, the actors ever using Sokka's name, but that could just be a trick of her memory, and she didn't want to risk anything.

As they stood up and exited the theatre, Sokka added, "The jokes that guy was making were pretty funny, though."

Azula had to restrain herself from laughing, and she couldn't keep herself from looking at his face, in which his eyes were set in kindness she had never seen from anyone else.

* * *

Aang slowly breathed in, keeping his breath in his lungs for a matter of seconds before letting it out again. In his left palm, he sustained a large bloom of fire, so that they could all see. He opened his grey eyes, flexed the fingers on his right hand, and groped them down towards his restraints. His thumb slipped under the band of metal, and his other fingers rested on top. With all the strength he could muster to his hand, he pulled upwards, grimacing.

"Stop. Breathe. Listen to the metal," Toph ordered, and Aang stopped wresting fruitlessly at the metal to try and feel the vibrations within it. His agile fingers skated over the metal, lightly recognizing where the bits he could bend were.

He slowly lifted his hand, and Toph's eyes widened as she heard the grunt of the metal shifting. "That's it, Twinkletoes!" she called, her heart suddenly racing. He was doing it!

Aang looked at his hand, washed in flickering firelight, slowly bending the metal out of place and gave a nervous, shaky grin. "Okay. I can do this."

His thumb slipped further under the band into a better position, and he gave a great rumble as he stretched the metal upwards. He looked over at Katara in excitement. She gave him a watery smile. "I can't believe it, Aang. We're going to make it."

Toph hushed them. "I hear her! She's coming down the hall."

They all fell silent, and soon enough, Aang and Katara could hear Azula clicking her way towards their cell. "Be strong," whispered Katara to Aang, but his frantic grey gaze gave her no reassurance, and then he extinguished the fire in his palm, and she couldn't see him anymore.

The door swung wide, letting in a flood of light.. "My favorite prisoners," sang Azula. "How are you? I see you're all awake and ready. Isn't that lovely?"

They all gave her glares of detestation. "So, who's first today?" said Azula, the cheerful tone gone from her voice. "You or you?" she asked darkly, closing the door behind her with a bang. She ignited a large fire in her hand and looked from Katara to Toph.

"How's Sokka?" asked Toph in a cynical voice.

Azula's heart skipped a beat, but with relief she remembered that Toph couldn't feel her breathing or heartbeat or anything. "Oh, he's pretty much the same as usual," she sighed. "Alive, that is. Hopefully for quite a while longer. He insists he's not going to break in captivity, but alone, we'll see what happens."

"What a load of bullshit," Toph laughed. "I wonder why I even ask."

Azula swallowed silently, wondering if Toph was bluffing or if she could actually tell Azula was lying. There shouldn't have been a way to tell…

"You first, then," Azula decided, finding that she didn't actually want to walk towards that wooden cage. Didn't want to hurt the girl who loved Sokka.

But she did.

After Toph was unconscious, Azula moved over to Katara's metal cage. The girl was still on the floor in chains, her wrists reddened from chafing.

When Azula walked into the cage, she stepped over Katara and knelt down behind her. She carefully sent a jet of fire up towards the ceiling, where it met some sort of torch that cast a dim reddish glow around the whole room.

Azula's fingers slowly lifted Katara's chin. The Water Tribe girl was very pretty, she mused, but at the slightest touch of her, the Avatar had twitched in Azula's peripherals.

Paying close attention to what Aang was doing, Azula slowly turned Katara's face towards her. Aang seemed to be shaking slightly.

Wasn't it obvious?  
Azula mentally slapped herself for not noticing it earlier. The Avatar was in love with this girl. It would be much more efficient to focus on just Katara, because messing with her would get results from Aang more quickly.

Grimly, Azula stood and reached for the lightning. She could hear Aang's breathing getting faster, and she looked down at the Water Tribe girl's helpless eyes she tried to draw lightning from the air and as she stared into Katara's eyes the lightning appeared with a crackle and as if in slow motion it bounded out of Azula's control and danced in a glittering streak randomly across the room and exploded onto the wall because as she was looking at the Water Tribe girl she realized exactly how much she reminded her of Sokka

and Azula fell to her knees and clutched her face in her hand and with pain in her eyes she looked up at Sokka's sister.

Azula sprinted out of the pen, quenched the torch above, and ran from the cell, slamming the door behind her.

Katara's eyes bled tears of relief as Aang stared after the girl who had fled the room.

* * *

The streets of the capital were quite dark, but it was darker still inside the palanquin. The curtains were cracked open to let in the muffled noise of the stream of people outside.

Sokka was disappointed. He wanted to be out and around the city, not inside yet another royal palace garnered with silk cushions and velvet. He tried peeking out, but couldn't get much of a glimpse before Azula pulled him back. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Those common people could try to kill you."

She then suddenly remembered with a slight twinge of guilt that the boy himself was from the Southern Water Tribe, who Azula largely considered to be less than common – peasants, really. Savage. But no – Sokka wasn't savage at all. Neither was his sister, actually. She had endured pain with dignity and grace quite unbefitting of any sort of peasant.

Azula sighed, glancing towards the crack in the curtain. "I mean," she continued, "they probably wouldn't. But you never know."

"They're just people," Sokka laughed. "We should meet some of them!"

Azula's face screwed up in disgust. "Why would you want to do that?"

"Well, I don't know," Sokka mused. "People are interesting, you know? Let's do it! Come on!"

Before Azula could say another word, Sokka had grabbed her wrist and leapt lightly out the side of the palanquin, dragging her along, her eyes wild in alarm.

They somehow managed to land on their feet in the middle of the street. Azula opened her mouth to call to the palanquin bearers, who were having a conversation and didn't seem to notice that their cargo had escaped. But before she could say anything, Sokka had clamped a big hand over her mouth. "Come on!" he whispered, and dragged her down the street the other way. Azula's scowl could have been seen for miles.

"Remind me why this is happening?" she hissed, yanking her hand from his, shooting paranoid glances at everyone who passed them. No one seemed to notice her, though, even with the golden emblem she presumed was set in her hair.

Sokka didn't seem to hear her. He was staring around the streets with wonder. Hung near every door was a dim red lantern that illuminated shouting shopkeepers. Milling through the streets was a huge number of people that were buzzing with life and speaking loudly. Sokka had never seen so many people in one place.

He walked over to the side of the street where a dingy light illuminated the entrance to what seemed to be a seedy little store. The shopkeeper was a large, pale man who smelled strongly of spice. "You look like a well-traveled man!" he said to Sokka with a giant grin. "And you look lovely, ma'am," he added to Azula, nodding to her.

Azula couldn't believe the grubby shopkeeper couldn't recognize her as Princess Azula and she reached a slender hand to her royal emblem, only to discover that it wasn't there. With shock, she remembered that she had taken it out on the palanquin ride. This was incredibly embarrassing – stuck with no identification as royal on the crowded streets of the capital! What next?!

Sokka smiled. "Actually, I don't think I've been many places at all," he said.

"Well, no matter!" the shopkeeper pressed on. "I'm sure we have something in here to interest you." He placed a chubby hand on Sokka's back and steered him inside.

Sokka's face lit up like a beacon upon entry. He glanced excitedly back at Azula. "Look at this place!" he exclaimed, glancing around the brightly lit store. It was filled with everything from weapons to clothing, and Sokka darted from shelf to shelf with gusto. Azula walked primly over to the selection of armor they had. She wrinkled her nose at the quality of most of the products, although a few had their constructive merits.

When she looked over at Sokka, he was closely examining the swords, his eyes gleaming with delight. "Azula! This sword is SO COOL!" he squealed, making her wish she had a bag over her head. The sword was interesting, though – it had a dark blade with a strangely angled tip. It seemed oddly familiar to her. "Can I get it?" Sokka asked, stars in his eyes as he gazed at the weapon.

"It's no concern of mine what you spend your money on," Azula sighed, "but it is a nice sword."

"Sweet!" Sokka exclaimed, rushing to the front desk.

Azula looked curiously out into the street. It was strange that no one was stopping or bowing to her, as they were usually required to do by law. These people in their natural habitat seemed… well, oddly, they seemed just as boisterous and uncouth as the Water Tribe and the Earth Kingdom peoples. After wondering for a second why she thought the latter two to be savages, she shook away the thoughts uneasily, turning back to Sokka.

He had strapped the sword around his waist. She nodded in approval.

"This is so exciting," Sokka said happily. "Best day ever. Where should we go next?"

Azula shrugged. "I'm indifferent," she replied.

"Okay," Sokka decided, "let's go and get some food! I could really use some fire flakes right now." Azula groaned; she still hadn't acquired the taste for the food that Sokka seemed to have. Nevertheless, she followed him from the store into a small restaurant down the street.

A stout young woman served them at their table for two. "Whatcha want?" she slurred loudly. Azula's nose wrinkled in disgust as she smelled alcohol. How desperately uncivilized…

"Flaming fire flakes, please," said Sokka. "You want anything?"

Azula shrugged. "Do you have jasmine tea?" she asked finally.

The woman nodded. It seemed that no sooner had she left than she returned, holding a steaming cup and a bowl filled with fire flakes.

Azula tried to sip the tea, but was repulsed. "Ugh. If my uncle tasted that, this whole store would be shut down immediately," she mumbled, and then felt embarrassed for even referring to Iroh. He wasn't usually talked about.

"Your uncle likes tea?" Sokka asked, gobbling the flakes.

Azula rolled her eyes. "To a humiliating degree," she sighed. "He always did like the more frivolous pursuits in life."

"Nothing wrong with frivolous pursuits," Sokka said casually, lounging back in his chair. "Every once in a while. You know."

The girl opposite him shrugged, tossing her hair regally. Sokka's eyes followed the glance of her amber eyes. They took in the restaurant with a mixture of scorn and curiosity, and then turned back to him. "I suppose. It's just… they don't feel as fulfilling, if you know what I mean."

"Yeah, but seriously, you've got to relax sometimes."

Azula's face filled with mirth at the mention of relaxation. Sokka remembered that Azula was just about as likely to relax as a moose-lion was to throw its cub off a cliff. He gulped down the rest of his fire flakes. "I mean, you could _try_ relaxing."

She gave him an unimpressed stare.

"No? No. Okay," Sokka muttered with a smirk. "I get it."

* * *

Aang dug his fingers into the metal and pulled, practicing moving it back and forth. "It's getting easier, I think," he told Toph.

"That's great, Aang," Katara said warmly. "By the time the full moon rolls around, you'll be completely ready to bend all of us out of here!"

Aang gave her a confident smile. "I think so," he agreed.

Toph smirked at him. "Hey, Twinkletoes… I was thinking, since we're going to be bending and all, why don't we go ahead and take down the Fire Lord? I mean, we're already inside his palace. He'll be asleep and unaware."

Aang shrugged. "I don't know, Toph," he said uneasily. His grey eyes wandered around the ceiling. "He'll probably hear us coming into his room, for starters. Also, he probably has a bunch of guards, and we just want to get Sokka and get out of here, not start a huge fight."

Snorting, Toph said, "Speak for yourself. I'd love a fight about now. I've been blind for what, a week and a half? Oh right! I can't tell, because I can't see!"

Katara shushed her. "We can't tell, either. Azula blocked in our window. We don't know if it's night or day right now."

"Well, this sucks," Toph muttered. "Oh well. I can't wait until we're out. That Azula bitch is going down."

Aang closed his eyes. He didn't feel like Azula had been there for at least a few days, which was strange, given that her visits used to be daily. The last time she had been there, she had stormed out in that weird sort of stricken rage. "I wonder what's wrong with her," he mused aloud.

"Lots of things," Katara said. "Lots and lots…"

* * *

Azula and Sokka emerged onto the street once more. Sokka looked up at the moon, which was nearly full. "That's a gorgeous moon," he sighed. "So, what are you up for now? Want to go back to the palace?"

Azula was puzzled to find that she didn't. The open air and the noise was actually strangely invigorating. It reminded her of Ba Sing Se, only less refined, and Azula was enjoying the liveliness around her.

"Not particularly," she answered, and Sokka smiled.

"Ooh, I have an idea," he said. "Come on."

They made their way through the throng of people into an alley, where two rain barrels stood. Sokka's arm muscles strained as he stacked one on top of the other.

He slowly clambered on top of the second barrel and hoisted himself to the roof of the house next to him. Azula followed with considerably more grace.

The noise seemed oddly muted from above, like an echo of something sealed away. Up on the roofs, the only thing that was immediately present was the huge penumbra of the sky, stretching over to seal them into a gorgeous starry dome.

Sokka walked down the center of the tiled roofs, toward the edge of the city. He looked over his shoulder at Azula, waving her on. She followed hesitantly.

The noise shrank even farther away as they leapt lightly from row of apartments to row of apartments, away from the center of the capital.

Sokka finally sat down on the roof with a tremendous sigh, looking upwards. Azula hesitantly seated herself next to him.

"This is amazing," Sokka said, his white teeth showing in a brilliant smile. Again it happened – Azula felt like she was being tipped into a bucket of ice. She closed her eyes and focused herself away from him, but her eyes shot open again when she felt his hand on hers. She considered yanking it away, but didn't.

Was this what it was like to have a brother? To have a friend? To have a significant other? She didn't have any of those things, and the rush of feeling that was battering at her stonewalled heart now seemed to betray the lack.

Sokka felt how smooth and delicate the hand was beneath his and turned his face to look at her. Azula was most determinedly looking straight ahead, not at him. He admired her profile, smiling gently as she swallowed, casting an awkward side glance at him only to look away immediately.

Sokka could see through her. He knew she'd like to be some sort of superhuman, but she reacted just like anyone would when he lightly brushed his thumb across her wrist. She seemed nervous, just like anyone else, when he slowly reached his left hand up and turned her face to look at him. And she definitely didn't feel superhuman when he leaned in and slowly pressed his lips to hers.

Azula's heart was going at a million miles a second. She didn't quite understand for a second what was happening. Her eyes were wide open, and she was frozen in place.

Then he pulled back slightly, his crystalline blue eyes questioning.

She didn't do anything that would betray the complete overhaul her brain was undergoing. She didn't even try to stop him when he leaned forward again and kissed her for the second time.

His mouth was gentle and very warm, pressing with a light insistence against her own lips. His hand had found its way to the back of her neck, where it rested lightly. Azula breathed in through her nose and cast all her logic away as she finally kissed him back, putting a hand on his warm bicep. She felt him smile and she let go of the last reserves of strength she seemed to have against him, and they kissed again and again and again until the vestiges of superiority she had tried to retain over him for so long dissipated.

They arrived back at the palace extremely late, much to the relief of everyone running around the palace throwing fits about their absence, and Azula would not touch him once they entered the doors. Sokka reasoned that she had to maintain some sense of order, of course.

After assuring everyone in the immediate vicinity that they were, in fact, fine, Azula bid him a breathless goodnight and walked briskly to her chambers. He just stood there and wondered exactly what he was doing, but figured it didn't matter since he was so blissfully happy in that moment.

Azula woke and realized she had overslept. She also realized that she didn't care. The sun was past its peak, but she didn't care. She had missed training for the day, but, strangely, she didn't care.

She just lay in her bed surrounded by opulent wealth and stared at the ceiling, allowing herself a frivolous, worthless smile, accompanied by all the frivolous, worthless happiness she had finally permitted herself.

* * *

**Yup, the chapter's a little odd. I'm open to suggestions, including a moderate edit and a re-upload for this one. Might need to flesh out some parts. If you have an idea or a critique, just tell me and I'll go back and change some stuff.**

**Thanks,**

**Speechwriter**


	10. The Dangerous Art of Escapism

**Okay, so I just realized I have 29 people on Story Alert. That's freakin' sick, man. Wish y'all would review! Think about it… that would be 290 reviews right about now. And more feedback for me to work off of.**

**Just think about it, yaknow?**

**Oh, and for you 139 people who read until the last chapter (yay hit counter!), I hope you enjoyed it. This one is freakishly long and I didn't study at all for my exam because of it, so I hope you like it too. And of course, eternal love to my reviewers.**

* * *

"What do you mean, he's still not letting people in? I want to see my father!" Azula hissed, glaring so intently at the officer in front of her that he thought he would burst out crying. Many souls had seen a less fearsome stare and not survived the experience.

He gulped. "I'm sorry, Princess. He has been giving messages through the loudspeaker to the alternate war chamber… orders and such."

"I know that!" she snapped furiously. "Don't you think I know that? I know that!" She sunk down into her chair and blew frustratedly at her hair. "Fine. What orders has he given in my absence?" Azula had gone down to interrogate Aang the day before, missing some unimportant secondary officers' war meeting. She had expected her father finally to break this juvenile silent treatment he was giving the palace, but apparently she was mistaken.

"Well," the officer said, seeming to brighten, "the invasion of the Northern Water Tribe is back on the schedule."

Azula perked up, jerking back in her chair. "Really!"

He nodded with a small, nervous smile, intensely relieved to see that The Stare had vanished from her face. "Yes, Princess, yes. He wants you to take a ship out in five days. He also instructed that you choose your own crew."

Azula nodded primly. "As it should be," she sniffed. "How about my father, just by the way? Has he given any reason for his absence?"

"Well, he did say that he was highly sick but believed himself to be getting better, although contagious," replied the officer. "His voice did sound a little stuffy."

"Ah. That would explain it," Azula said idly. "Alright, that's it, you may go."

The man scurried out, astounded by his survival.

Azula sighed and leaned her head back in her chair, staring at the red ceiling. So she was to leave in five days… finally… for the North Pole. She smiled contentedly. It would be like a pleasure cruise – plotting the downfall of her greatest enemy while spending time on the open seas with the one person she cared about.

* * *

Aang pulled up his constraints slightly, as he had been doing for the last few days, and snuck out of them, standing up with dizziness attacking him.

"Urgh, this is so not fair!" Toph whined, kicking the wall in fury. "Stupid box. Stupid wood."

"I'm sorry, Toph," Katara said apologetically as Aang slowly snapped the catch on her cuffs. Toph couldn't earthbend because she would have to get out of the box to do so, and then Azula would see that it had been opened forcibly.

Katara slowly took in a deep breath. The full moon was very close. "I'd say we only have a few more days," she said with a bright smile. Aang grinned and leaned forward, clutching her in a tight embrace. Katara swallowed a lump in her throat, glad to the point of pain to be able to get out of this place.

Katara slowly raised her hand, and with a quick swish downwards of her hand, water was sucked from the air and into her grip. She ran it over her wounds, healing them slightly but not enough for it to be noticeable. Mostly she healed the internal breakages – a broken bone here, a small hemorrhage there – and after she finished she sighed with relief. "Okay," she said to Aang with a motherly tone in her voice. "I know you don't like the idea, but bloodbending really would help us get out of here."

Aang shook his head. "I know. I thought it over, and I think it would be good for me to learn." His grey eyes shone confidently down at her. Katara still thought it was strange that Aang was a couple inches taller than her – she wasn't used to looking up at anyone besides Sokka. Katara nodded.

"Okay. First of all, put your hands closer to center, like this – one hand draws a line straight back to your stomach, and one leads to your throat."

"Hey!" Aang exclaimed. "That's cool – the stomach chakra is the one that contains willpower, and the throat controls truth."

Katara raised her eyebrows. "Huh! So it's like you're making your will the truth or something? Anyway… just do it, Aang. You've got to learn this."

Toph raised her hand glumly. "I'm assuming," she mumbled, "that I'm going to be the one you guys practice on?"

Aang looked at Katara in mild horror.

"Um, I guess," Katara said tentatively. "Is that okay? We're not going to hurt you or anything. I won't let that happen."

Toph shrugged. "Whatever. You guys saw what 'Zula did to me."

Katara swallowed. "Okay, Aang, so you know how to take it from the air. Moving it around in someone's body is really similar. Try just feeling the water in my body, for instance."

Aang cautiously put a hand on her shoulder, and he could feel the steady pulse of the fluids inside her – blood along with water and other liquids too.

"Okay, but how do I move it without it, like, ripping out of your body?"

Katara brushed her hair, which was hanging down limply, from her eyes. "Like all bending, the bigger the movement, the bigger the reaction. If you keep one hand stationary and move the other really quickly, you could probably rip something off. But let's not think about that. To make someone fall down, for instance, you're going to do this."

Instantly, the girl fell back into a stance, holding her hands up, spider-like. She jerked both hands to opposite sides, and Aang felt like he was being thrown downwards. But he didn't hit the ground. His eyes flickering up, he saw that Katara was holding him in the air, her muscles and face straining. She slowly lowered him to the ground.

"See, what I did was I moved the water in the upper half of your body with my right hand, and the lower half with my left. Smaller movements can control smaller portions of the human form – just make sure you keep one hand stationary to control the rest of the body, okay?"

Aang nodded, getting up shakily. "So, should I try it now?" he said hesitantly, scared that he would rip something off someone.

"Okay, actually, on second thought, I'd be more comfortable if you practiced on me," Katara laughed nervously, casting a glance at Toph, who blew her hair out of her eyes with a sullen eyeroll.

Aang settled back into his stance, raising his hands and splaying out the fingers like Katara had. He closed his eyes and felt for the flow, the pulse inside the girl opposite him…

There it was. He crooked his fingers slightly, and when he opened his eyes, he was suddenly locking her body into a freeze frame. "Okay," he said nervously, "what do I do now?"

He relaxed. Katara gasped, slumping downwards. "Wow," she said. "You've got a really strong grip."

Aang slowly helped her up. "I'm sorry," he muttered in a low voice, his eyes dejected.

"No, no! That's good," Katara reassured him, shaking back her hair. "Okay, this time when you do it, slowly move your index finger on your right hand down to let my jaw loose so I can talk to you, okay?"

Aang did as he was told, and Katara slowly instructed him through the ancient and terrifying art of bloodbending.

* * *

"Sokka!" Azula called enthusiastically. She was up in the hallway, looking down into the courtyard, where Sokka was practicing. "Hey! Sokka!"

He slowly finished the form, slipped his dark sword back into its scabbard, and looked up at Azula, breathless. Her eyes slowly trailed their way down his lean, tanned chest and arms. "Guess what I was just informed of?"

"What?" he called back, walking over to stand right below her.

She crouched down, looking at him through the red wooden bars of the rail. "I am leading the invasion of the Northern Water Tribe!"

"That's great!" he panted, his hands on his hips, a broad grin splitting his face. He ran over to the stairs and bounded up, holding out a hand for her to grab to stand up. She enjoyed the strong grip of his warm hand.

They walked down the hallway in perfect unison, their arms brushing occasionally. Azula looked down at a hand, picking at one of her nails, while really studying Sokka's reaction as she said, "Yes, I have to leave in five days."

His face contorted into a sort of mixture between revulsion and confusion that Azula enjoyed. "Wait, wait, five days? And what's this 'I' stuff?"

"Yes, five days. I've packed my things. As for the 'I', I'm leading the invasion, Sokka. I can't have any distractions," she told him, a small smile on her red lips, lowering her lashes to look at him from beneath them.

"I'm not going to distract you," Sokka scoffed, opening the door to Azula's room and stepping inside. She walked over to the lamps and lit them, turning to lean against the wall, cocking her head, the small smile still there.

"How can I be sure? This is the biggest order of my life," Azula reminded him. "Nothing can go wrong. Absolutely nothing."

Sokka sighed and smiled sheepishly. He knew where this was going. She wanted him to convince her why he should come. Well, he would give the beautiful, infuriating princess a reason, all right.

He walked slowly up to her, the angelic smile on her lips twitching in anticipation.

"Nothing's going to go wrong, first of all," he said in a low voice. "Secondly, don't you need an adviser? Someone you can trust?"

In the dim light, Sokka looked darker than he usually did, the shadows across his face making his eyes look deep and the smirk on his lips suggestive. "How do I know I can trust you?" Azula sighed, looking off into the distance as if she weren't won over at all.

She loved playing cat-and-mouse with him. He made every move perfectly, said all the right words. Their minds fit like a hand and a glove.

Sokka was so close she could smell the dark, musky scent of him, mixed with the clean jasmine soap of his room. Her forehead was practically resting against his nose, and the absolute quiet of the room was slightly disrupted by his soft breathing. His dark hair, tufted and swept back into that ridiculous ponytail, extended slightly over his forehead, sending shadow across it as she looked up at his face, placing a single cool hand on his chest. She pushed him back lightly. He took a tiny step back. "How can I trust you?" she murmured again.

Suddenly, a wide, mischievous grin broke out on his face. He leaned down and swept her up into his arms. "You can't," he whispered in her ear, and she could feel his lips brushing the tip of her lobe slightly as they spoke the words.

She tilted her head upwards and leaned forwards to capture those lips in a rough kiss. She smiled as he kissed her, because he didn't know just how true those words were… But for now, Azula didn't mind. The smile was a bitter one. She wondered just how temporary 'temporary' was.

* * *

Aang lifted his arms and Toph slowly raised from the ground, frozen in the exact same pose she had been in. He slowly moved his arms and each of her limbs extended.

"That's really good, Aang! Really smooth." Katara clapped softly, a big smile on her face. "Nice work."

Katara sighed. She wondered if Azula was going to make one final visit before the full moon the night after this one, a mere matter of hours from now. She wondered why she hadn't yet. She was so happy that Aang had been able to learn metalbending and bloodbending almost in the same breath. She didn't think it was possible to be so happy while trapped in a godforsaken cell in the bottom of the Fire Nation.

Aang flopped back to the ground, having released Toph. He smiled the goofy smile that Katara hadn't seen in so long. "I feel so ready," he sighed. "Like, seriously, if I can bloodbend this well tonight, think about what it's going to be like with the full moon!"

He made an enthusiastic arm-flail and Katara laughed quietly.

"Hey, you guys, hate to rain on the parade – but how are we going to find Sokka?" Toph deadpanned dismally. She hated not being able to bend, so cynical, nasty Toph was the only Toph the other two ever saw these days.

"Threatening gets you a long way," Katara replied instantly, an uncharacteristically sinister smile on her face. "Torture gets you even farther."

"Whoa," Toph said, taken aback. "Chill out there. Okay."

Katara's expression lightened once more, and she dismally clicked her cuffs back on. She could feel the sun rising and her power decreasing slightly. "Time to go to sleep, you guys," she said, and with a yawn, she left Aang to fasten the heavy metal ball once more around her ankles as she drifted to sleep.

* * *

"I'm so excited!" Sokka whooped. "We get to go to the freakin' North Pole! This is so cool, Azula. I'm really excited."

"Yeah, well, it's not going to be all fun and games," Azula warned him. "War doesn't usually tend to be a basket of lilies."

Sokka sighed contentedly, putting his arm around Azula's shoulders. She rested her head on his shoulder lightly, and his hand slowly stroked her hair. "What's on your mind?" he asked.

"Nothing much," she said. "I just – I'm wondering where my brother is. I bet he joined up with that White Lotus Society group." She sighed. "I wish he weren't so wishy-washy about his beliefs." Right after saying it, she realized how hypocritical that was. Azula, the infamously unfeeling, was now sitting in her room on her sofa with a man that she deeply cared for. She couldn't even start to explain what she was feeling, so how could she criticize her brother for something like loyalty when she didn't know what she would do if she were forced to choose?

No. Of course she knew. Country first, right. Country first.

But then again – wasn't that her father's job? To sacrifice everything for the Fire Nation?

She had given up so much already, estranging everyone around her… until now. Now she was finally taking something. Wasn't she allowed to keep it? Keep him?

Azula couldn't believe she was having this debate. Two weeks ago her answer would have been unquestionable. How had so many barriers fallen in such a short amount of time?

She liked Sokka. She liked being with him. She liked the feel of his warm skin and his smile and his intelligence and his stupid jokes. She liked the way it felt when he pushed back gently when they kissed, the way it was when he let his hands rest lightly on her waist. She liked talking strategy with him, or sparring energetically with him, or even reading quietly together. He put up with all the things she said and then realized she shouldn't have said, things that were so socially inept of her to say that it was hard to believe that she was supposed to be a genius.

Was this how Mai felt when she was with Zuko?

It was hard to think of her own brother that way. He was so feminine, for a start – pale and sickly, like a child and a woman. Wishy-washy, as she had said. Unsure. A pushover. Sokka was warm and firm, unyieldingly stubborn while playful. Perfect for her.

Azula reached over and grasped his hand, suddenly needing to be closer to him. The smile faded off her lips. This ache she felt to be closer wasn't a nice feeling. She clenched her eyes tight shut.

Sokka said, "Well, he's in Ba Sing Se and we're here. What can you do, you know?" Azula let out a small, derisive chuckle.

"It's been too long since I was on the sea," she said with a smile. "It shall be… fun."

* * *

"It's today," said Aang. "I can feel it. Am I right?"

Katara nodded. It was probably late afternoon. They only had a few hours left before they could start. The guards patrolled for the last time at midnight, so that was when they would break out, force the guards to tell them where Sokka was, and everything would go down great. Azula never came after sundown, so that was when they would free themselves and Toph would plan a way through the palace to get away.

Katara smiled. She could completely heal her brother, no matter how bad his wounds were. She was sure that if he had – Spirits forbid it – died, Azula would have come to gloat over the issue, so he was probably just as decrepit as the last time they had seen him, only better-fed, otherwise he would have died regardless...

Katara sighed. She tried to get back to sleep – she needed her rest, and so did Aang. They were taking turns sleeping so that they would definitely be awake when the sun went down. She was excited, though, and that didn't work well with her plans of rest.

She took a deep breath, thought of her brother, and closed her eyes.

* * *

"So, we're leaving tomorrow," Sokka panted as he did a scissor leap over Azula's blast of blue fire. "I hope you're packed."

"Of course I'm packed, you idiot," Azula laughed, spinning a disk of flame from between her nails. She leapt with agility to the side as Sokka lunged towards her with his sword drawn. "Are you?"

"Almost," Sokka said, and his eyes widened as he saw her pointed fingers drawing lightning from the air. She had gone through a strange phase where her lightning had gotten away from her every time, but for some reason, it seemed to have settled back into place.

He sprinted away and did a huge leap at the last second. The lightning rocketed beneath him and smashed a vase behind them. "Hoo! That was close," Sokka breathed, then ducked quickly as she unleashed another line of flame at him.

He sidestepped her attacks, weaving his way closer to her. He finally managed to get in close enough to attack with his sword.

She ducked his slices, reaching up with her hand to gently hold aside his arm. She was a genius at weaponless fighting because she was so nimble. "Watch that blind spot in the back," she reminded Sokka as she spun around under him to evade the stab of his dark gray sword. It let off a strange ringing noise as it swung through the air. She frowned. She didn't like the sword, as handsome as it was, and she wasn't sure why. Sokka seemed to love it.

Azula managed to slip around behind him, grab his sword arm by the elbow, prodding a muscle to make his hand open and release the sword. She put a forearm around his throat.

"I win," she said in a light voice, standing on her tiptoes to whisper it into his ear.

She let him go, and he picked up his sword. "Damn, Azula," Sokka groaned. "I'm going to sleep well tonight. That was a workout."

"And I won!" she sang, giving him an evil smile.

"That's a change from usual," Sokka laughed sarcastically. "Let's go and get some dinner. The head cook told me he's making this amazing dumpling dish."

"Sounds ravishing," Azula said dryly, raising an eyebrow at him. He leaned down and gave her a quick kiss on the lips.

"I'm going to go wash up," Sokka said. "See you there in an hour?"

"Sure," she said, waved, and, humming, walked back to her room, where she undressed and soaked in her steaming hot bathtub.

* * *

"Okay," Aang hissed. "The sun's been down for an hour. The guys who brought us dinner are long gone, Katara. Katara? Katara, wake up!"

She woke up slowly, blinking the sleep from her eyes. "Okay," she said blearily.

Toph said in a shivery voice, "I'm going to be able to see again… Get me out of here. Now."

Aang yanked up on his restraints and they popped clear of the ground. Katara raised her eyebrows.

She watched as he used metalbending to turn his ex-restraints into a crude knife, and then waterbended Toph from her cage.

Toph leapt onto the stone. She flipped over onto her back and tears streamed from her eyes, her hands digging into the stone and holding on like it was a lifeline. Standing back up, she flung her arms around Aang. "It's so great to see you guys again," she choked out, a look of such magnificent, refreshing relief on her face that Aang actually felt his own eyes moisten slightly.

Aang tore the cuffs from Katara's wrists as Toph gently slid sheets of rock in and out of the walls and floor, getting back into the swing of her bending. Katara looked up at Aang, who was holding her wrists lightly. Suddenly, she felt her heartbeat quickening, and from the small quiver of amusement she saw in his lips, he felt it too.

"Aang," she said, "thank you so much."

"Thank you, Katara," Aang said, his tenor voice sounding very mature and sincere for a change. The fifteen-year-old didn't miss a beat in leaning down and kissing the girl in front of him. Nothing monumental – a simple, sweet kiss. "I love you."

"I know," Katara whispered. And she did. She had known for the last few years, and Aang had told her too many times to count. But somehow, now, she felt a twinge of some emotion other than mere platonic friendship, deep inside. She swallowed and slowly brought her lips again to his. There it was again – a flutter of something down in her heart. She cared so much about Aang – as a brother, as a friend, as a moral compass, even – but now was she finally feeling what he felt for her?

They broke apart, again, quickly. Aang gave her a nervous smile and squeezed her hand, letting go. He knew her so well – he knew she would be embarrassed afterwards that it happened in front of Toph. Katara felt grateful for the action.

Toph turned to Katara and raised an eyebrow lightly.

"Okay, you guys," whispered Katara. "Let's undertake Part A of the plan."

The first stage was taking part of the cage, cutting it up, and placing it in front of the bars. That way, the guards would see it and come in, and the gang could lock them inside without worrying that they would escape.

Then, they would find out where Sokka was. If those two guards didn't know, they would be knocked unconscious and the key to the door would be left behind so they could get out eventually. Katara almost felt like they were being too generous.

* * *

"Dinner was nice," Azula said. "The noodles were just a bit sub-par, but then again, it's all imported, so you never know what you're going to get with strange Earth Kingdom foods."

Sokka patted his stomach as if it were protuberant, when it was just as flat as ever. Sokka seemed to inhale food and make it vanish into nowhere. "I thought it was pretty good myself," Sokka sighed, "but I'm easily impressed, you know."

"Yes, I know," commented Azula.

"'Cept in my taste in girls, that is," Sokka said cheesily, looking at her and batting his eyes ridiculously. She shoved him, laughing,

"I'm the only girl your age you've ever met, stupid."

"Well, you'd still be the best even if you weren't," Sokka insisted.

Azula gave a small shrug, looking up angelically as if agreeing. "So, I was thinking about the invasion. A full-scale invasion force might work, but honestly, I think it would be a waste of expenditure."

Sokka nodded in agreement. "Why would you use a hundred battleships when you can use just one small ship to infiltrate the system?"

"Exactly," Azula said. "But it's not an infiltration I'm thinking of. You see, the whole place is surrounded by huge walls of ice. If those melted by surprise, then the whole place would be thrown into chaos. Most would survive because they have so many waterbenders, so it would be optimal – their home would just be ruined, so they would be panicked and easy to capture. I suppose we would take two or three battleships to hold the prisoners we would take."

"Brilliant, as usual," said Sokka sincerely. "I really don't know where you come up with this stuff."

"Simple," Azula said with another shrug, tossing her hair and smiling. "So, shall we finish packing your things?"

Sokka nodded. "What do I need? I mean, how long are we going to be gone?"

Azula sighed. "By sea, it will probably take a little upwards of a month to arrive there. Just pack all the clothes you have – you don't have many, after all."

"A month? Wow," Sokka said.

"It is the North Pole," Azula reminded him, and he shrugged.

"Still a long time to be away from home," he said.

Azula swallowed. She wondered if he would feel like the North was more his home than here.

They threw all of Sokka's meager possessions into a trunk and then took it down to the palace staff, who loaded it onto the palanquin to be taken down to the harbor the next day with them.

It was dark by the time they returned to Sokka's room.

"Well, goodnight," Azula said, but Sokka shook his head, opening his door.

"You should stay," he told her. Her smooth light skin looked like it was glowing, bathed in the light of the full moon, but once she stepped inside his room all pretenses were dropped.

Sokka slowly slid his shirt over his head, walking towards the bathroom, where his robe was hanging. But he felt a touch on his bare back and turned to see Azula's questioning look.

He swallowed. Azula's fingers were incredibly light, but wherever they went, they left his nerves in a state of disrepair, as if she were lighting his skin on fire. She wasn't even looking at the places she was touching – she was staring into his eyes, her amber gaze coy and yet fierce. His heart beat fast and he stepped closer.

She tilted her head up at him, his soft blue eyes looking at her with careful adoration. His hand slowly reached for the robe, but he didn't put it on.

Azula took it from him, smiled, and stepped past him, shutting the door to his bathroom.

He sighed.

She came back wearing only his robe and a pair of loose black pants, her makeup wiped away, and he smiled. He thought she looked more beautiful than she ever had in her noble clothing.

The pair slipped into bed. Azula's back pressed lightly against Sokka's chest, and their legs touched lightly. His forearm was draped around her waist, and he undid her hair for her, tucking it lightly behind her ear.

He hesitated for a second, and then said, "I love you."

Azula's body tensed, as he knew it would, and then relaxed, as he knew it would. She said, "I know."

He chuckled and pressed his lips to her bare neck, making her shiver. Then he whispered, "Not what I was looking for."

She reached back with a hand and turned her head to look at him. "I love you too, okay?" she mumbled. "Now, just... just go to sleep."

Her lips kissed him lightly as his eyelids shut, his nose breathing in the sweet perfume of her hair. Azula's small form felt perfect lightly held in his embrace, their bodies fitting together like yin and yang.

* * *

Aang held his breath as the guards approached the cell. They had put a large stick of wood right behind the door, clearly visible from outside in the square of light shining through the door.

"What in the hell is that?" one of them asked.

"Don't know," the other one replied. "We should probably check it out."

They unlocked the door cautiously, stepping inside. It was completely dark.

One of them held up his fist, igniting a flame that illuminated the room, and no sooner had he done that than he was encased in rock up to the neck, as was his counterpart.

Katara and Aang each held up their hands, freezing the men in place.

Toph spoke in a furious voice. "Okay, here's the deal. You tell us absolutely everything you know about where Sokka is. He's her brother. If you lie, you'll stay here forever until you die. If you tell the truth, we'll knock you out, let you loose, and leave the key here so you can get out when you wake up. And I'm the girl who can tell if you're lying, so, yeah, watch your step."

The men were veritably frozen in terror. Aang slowly let loose the jaw of the one he was holding. The guard started talking. "I have absolutely no idea where your brother is. We were assigned specifically to your cell. You can ask my friend – I'm telling the truth. We don't know where he is."

"Dammit," Aang cursed, stomping on the ground to retract Toph's stone prisons. Toph lifted a rock and hit them both over the head, and Aang and Katara released them with distaste. The men slumped to the floor.

Aang shifted away the debris in front of the door once more so that nothing would be suspect, and then he took the key from the belt of the guard, unlocked the door, and threw it back onto his prone form.

"More than you're worth, I'm sure," Katara spat at the unconscious guards as they exited, the door clicking shut behind them.

They blinked. It was bright out here – they had each taken turns staring out the door so that this wouldn't be too blinding, but it was so bright all around that it was still a little stunning.

It felt strange to be out of captivity.

The three rushed down the hallway, Toph directing them to the stairs. They climbed up four levels before seeing any other guards.

This one was a short, plump man, balding. Toph knocked him face-first into the floor, and Aang and Katara were there in a second.

He, too, knew nothing about where Sokka was. They stuck him into a cell and knocked him out.

They climbed the final flight of stairs and emerged into a wide, red room. "Shit," Katara whispered. "Where is my brother?"

Toph shushed her. "There's another guy coming now," she hissed.

They leapt out at the man who came around the corner, trapping him. Katara raised his hand and he was frozen midstep.

"We need to know where a certain prisoner is," Katara said carefully. "Can you help us?"

She released his face, and he babbled, "I don't even work as a guard. I work in the kitchen. Oh Spirits, please let me go, I'm just a kitchen boy, I didn't do anything…"

Aang wrinkled his nose. "Well, maybe you've heard from the Princess where she's keeping a prisoner named Sokka?"

His face went blank. "Sokka? I know Sokka."

Toph nodded. "He's telling the truth."

"Sokka's not a prisoner," he continued.

Aang, Katara, and Toph exchanged dubious glances. "Excuse me?" Katara said in a dangerous voice.

"Tall guy, right? Tan? Looks sort of like you? Blue eyes, carries a sword? Not a prisoner," the man said, swallowing uncomfortably. "His room is up those steps, down the hall, out onto the outside hall, make a right – five doors down, I think."

Toph breathed, "Not lying."

"Okay. Put him out," Katara said, and the man opened his mouth to scream, but Toph knocked him unconscious.

They lifted up a tile of the floor, lowered him into the crawlspace beneath, and put the tile back down. He would be able to push his way out later.

"We're way too nice to these people," Toph grunted.

"Do you think it's true? Sokka's not a prisoner?" Aang whispered as they rushed up the wide, sweeping stairs and down the hall.

"I don't understand," Katara said. "I'm so confused right now."

They walked down five doors. The door was unlocked.

Aang slowly pushed it open.

* * *

**CLIFFHANGER! Evil laughter.**

**Just kidding. I don't want to start another whole word document, so I'm going to keep writing now. Here.**

* * *

Moonlight slowly slanted into a gorgeous room, comfortable-looking but relatively empty, void of possessions from what the three could see. They slowly entered the room, and, as one, peered over at the bed. It was too dark to see anything – the room didn't have windows.

Aang slowly placed a finger to a lamp wick, igniting it and casting a low glow across the room. Katara looked more closely at the bed. Something was curled up beneath the covers.

She walked over until she was standing right next to the bed and then her eyes widened. Katara felt faint for a second, and then, suddenly, she let out a fragment of a scream. Aang held up his hands to silence her, but it was too late. The damage was done. The thing was stirring slightly under the sheets.

And, as Aang looked closer, he saw why Katara had yelled. He let out his own yell of disgust, fully awakening the two figures who were under the deep red covers.

"Sokka?" Katara whispered as he sat up, bleary-eyed.

"Yeah? What?" he mumbled. "Why am I up?"

"Come on, Sokka, we're here to rescue you," Aang encouraged. Azula was slowly straightening up, her amber eyes hypnotic and dark in the one lamp's flickering light. But she seemed lost for words – or actions. She just sat there, looking blankly at them.

"From what?" asked Sokka sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head.

Toph's heart was pounding. She couldn't see him because the bed was wooden, but she heard Sokka's voice, and it didn't sound threatened or endangered. This was not a thrilling escape – there was a problem. And Toph became more acutely aware of the problem when another voice spoke.

"Forget it," Azula said.

Katara's eyes widened and she started hyperventilating. "Spirits, what is happening?"

"You tell me," sighed Sokka. "I'm still wondering why I'm awake."

"Just… go back to sleep, Sokka," Azula said, and Sokka put his hand on her shoulder. Aang felt nauseated. He was so bewildered by the whole situation. Why was Sokka here? Why was Azula in bed with him!? Why didn't he recognize them…

But it didn't matter. "YOU BITCH!" Katara suddenly screamed, lifting her hands. Azula's whole body suddenly went rigid. Then Katara threw her hands to the right. Azula's body was yanked from the bed and flew across the room, hitting the wall with a sickening thud.

Sokka's mouth opened wide and his face contorted in anger. "Azula!" he yelled, flinging himself from the bed to run to her. It was bizarre, Aang mused – completely bizarre, nightmarish. Like the guy in front of them was born on the wrong side. Like he had never even known Aang, or Katara, or Toph…

Aang lit up the rest of the lamps in a stream of fire. It was Sokka, alright – groomed, cleaned, healed, muscular, well – and he was crouching by Azula, helping her sit back up as if they were best friends. Looking at her tenderly as if they were lovers.

Sokka looked over at them. "I don't know who the hell you think you are," he snarled, "but if you don't leave, Spirits help me, I'm going to call the guards."

Katara's mouth drifted open and tears started to stream from her eyes. She started to wail miserably, but Sokka wasn't even looking at her. Azula had broken her nose, it seemed, on the wall, and blood was leaking from her nostril. Sokka wiped it away slowly. Azula's body was racked in silent sobs – she hadn't felt so much pain in a while – and Sokka's shushing was only making Katara cry more miserably.

"Get out!" Sokka yelled at them. "Leave!"

"Shut up!" Toph screamed, with such absolute pain in her voice that Sokka stopped to listen.

"Sokka," Toph said deliberately, "my name is Toph. Do you remember me?"

"No…" Sokka said slowly. "Wait… are you guys – did I know you? At some point?" His face changed into an expression of curiosity and suspicion, as well as excitement.

Aang slowly pulled a bison whistle, improvised from stone, from his pocket and gathered a mighty breath to blow it. He had been blowing into it all day, so wherever Appa was, he should have been close enough to hear it.

"Oh, way more than that," Katara sobbed. "Sokka – you're my -"

"Don't listen to them!" Azula interrupted. "They're enemies to the Fire Nation!"

"What? So are you!" Toph yelled to Sokka. "You're from -"

Azula drew in a deep breath and screeched, "GUARDS!"

"Wait, no!" Sokka said. "I have to hear this! Where am I from?"

Katara pointed a finger at Azula. "She kno -"

But as if it were scripted, suddenly the door was broken down by a group of guards. This hallway was patrolled by a night shift that was passing by when they heard Azula's shriek.

Aang lifted his hands, but he could only hold one of the men in place. Katara managed to keep three of them in check, but the other aimed a fiery blast at Aang. Toph rolled a wall of earth in front of him.

"An earthbender!" breathed Sokka.

Suddenly, there was a colossal groan, and something descended outside. It looked like a massive cloud.

Aang released the man he was holding in place and leapt lightly onto an air scooter, spinning over the heads of the guards. Toph flung her arms up and covered herself in stone, knocking out the wall so that it was open to the hallway. Katara stumbled backwards towards the gaping opening, her blue eyes filled with agony as she stared at her brother. "Sokka," she said, "you're my b -"

And then one of the guards punched her in the stomach.

Suddenly furious, she whipped water out of the air and threw it onto the guard, lacerating his skin. Sokka's jaw dropped. "Waterbender?" he whispered.

Katara trembled with hatred as she looked at Azula, and as she stumbled out where the wall used to be, she threw a cluster of fine needles of ice at the Princess. She vaulted the rail onto Appa's back and only had a moment more, before the bison rose to keep the guards from following. In that moment, though, she managed to see that Sokka's face twisted into terror at the sight of the needles heading towards the princess, and before Azula could melt them, he dove in front of her, catching the spray of deadly ice full in his bare torso, dyeing his tanned skin red.

* * *

**There. That's the end.**

**Possibly the longest chapter I've ever written… Hope you're happy with it.**

**R&R, por favor! I'd like to actually know how people felt about this one – feedback feedback feedback, please.**

**Thanks,**

**Speechwriter**


	11. Revival

**You guys, I am so sorry. This update is late for many reasons – first, semester exams were kicking my ass, second, this chapter was getting a severe case of Post-Plot-Point Syndrome, and third, I felt overwhelmed by the pressure that a GIANT number of reviews was placing on me.**

**Except that last reason is awesome. Seriously, thank you so much for your feedback, and sincere apologies for the inexcusable lateness.**

* * *

"It's okay," Aang sighed heavily, placing a hand on Katara's shoulder.

Her shaking body would not stop racking with sobs. When she looked up at Aang, her gaze was filled with anger and frustration. Her nose was red and her face was tear-streaked. "No, Aang," she whispered, "it's not okay. That's my brother."

As if she were realizing it for the first time, she looked up into the sky and her lips stretched into the very picture of misery, her eyes squinting shut, her voice emitting loud, ugly sobs.

Toph would not speak. She was leaning over the side of the saddle, gently stroking Appa. She couldn't seem to cry any more than she had the last three days. Her pale face was pallid and unhealthy-looking, drained of all feeling. She couldn't even feel any residual anger. She couldn't seem to blame Katara for what she'd done, no matter how hard she tried. Toph just couldn't muster up the energy.

Aang reached an arm around and enfolded Katara in his grip. "Listen," he said, "it'll be fine. Sokka is going to be okay – he survived what Azula did to him; he'll survive a few ice needles. So if he's okay, then we can rescue him – maybe after a while, his memory will come back. You'll see – it's all going to turn out okay. In the meantime, we can help the White Lotus Society in Ba Sing Se."

"I don't want to help the White Lotus," Katara protested, "I want to help my brother! I've done enough to hurt him – I just want him to be back, the same as he used to be..."

She buried her face in her knees and would not speak again, no matter how much Aang tried to coax or reassure.

"Give it a rest, Twinkletoes," snapped Toph from the far side of the saddle. "Just let the girl mope if she wants to so bad."

Aang closed his eyes and climbed over to Appa's head, hoping that Toph and Katara would not start warring again. The last thing they needed was more conflict. They had enough of that to deal with already.

* * *

"I'm not going to say you've been lucky," the doctor said. "This is very unfortunate."

"But will he be okay?" Azula demanded.

"There's no way to tell," sighed the man, who was graying, short, and bespectacled. "We have to wait a few days to see if his medical condition improves."

Azula seethed. "So we can't go to the North Pole?"

The doctor shrugged, tucking his glasses into his pocket, looking down at Sokka. The Water Tribe boy lay on a metal table in the middle of the hall, breathing lightly. The doctor replied, "I mean, he's stable, so we could move him to the ship. If the ice had hit his heart directly, we would know by now, but it obviously didn't because he's still alive. Same with the lungs."

He peered at Sokka's chest, which had four ugly puncture marks in it. "I'd say he's probably experiencing quite a bit of internal bleeding, but there's no way to say if those needle things went into a vein or an artery."

Azula sat down, putting her head in her hands. "Well," she said quietly, "at least they were thin, so they didn't cause much damage, right?"

"In hypothesis," responded the doctor. "But you never know. The reason he's unconscious may just be from shock, or it could be from something worse."

The princess closed her eyes. "Well, what the hell DO you know that you can tell me for sure?" she snarled.

"Now, don't get ugly, Princess Azula," said the doctor in a cold voice. "I've been the doctor in this palace for thirty-five years. No one else could tell you more or give you more direction than I can, and I'm telling you what we do now is wait, whether it's on the way to the North Pole or here."

Azula prayed that she would know what to do, suppressing the anger she felt at the doctor's disrespect. If they could get Sokka onto the ship, that would be great, but what if it endangered his medical condition?

Ideally, she thought, she would wait here with him until he awoke, but who could know when that would be? Even the few days they would need for assessment of his condition left more time for word to get out about the invasion. Who knew how much the Avatar had managed to wring out of those guards he knocked out... They were concussed, and Azula couldn't trust their testimonies.

Azula let out a frustrated noise of rage and hit her knee with a closed fist.

"Okay," she finally said, letting out her breath. "Let's move him to the ship. We have to get going."

With the utmost care, Sokka was transported to the warship that Azula was taking to the North Pole – one of three. She hovered over him like an anxious mother. Every time the cart went over a bump, she cursed and glared at everyone in sight.

They set sail the same day, chugging out of the port. Azula had set the first four days or so away for more detailed planning, but she couldn't do anything else but sit in the small room below deck with Sokka's immobile body. She couldn't tear himself from his side, and when they brought her food, they would come back later to see that she was asleep and her food was untouched.

Azula's waking hours were spent lightly touching Sokka's chest wounds as they scabbed over, observing his face, praying it would suddenly come back to animation, angry fits of rage consuming her. She would yell at his body only to break down in tears and try to feed him. Some of the soup actually did get swallowed reflexively by his unconscious body.

On the second day at sea, a sergeant came below deck to check on her.

"Princess," he said, and snapped a smart salute. "How are you?"

He didn't know why he asked that. He hoped she didn't get mad, and he was downright shocked when she replied, "Not so good, Sergeant Xi." He didn't even think she knew his name in the first place.

"And, uh, why is that, Princess?"

"As you can see, Sokka here simply refuses to wake up. I don't suppose you could fix that?"

She looked up at him, and he was shocked to see that her eyes were swollen and her eyeliner was lightly smudged from tears. She seemed weary and exhausted. "Uh, no, I'm sorry, Princess."

"Do you have a wife, Sergeant?" Azula asked, gesturing for him to sit down on the sofa next to her. They were in the royal chamber – it was as if a room from the palace itself had been transplanted onto the ship, and Sokka's cart sat bizarrely in the middle of the room like a strange centerpiece, his unmoving body giving the room an eerie feeling.

The officer slowly sat down. "Yes, Princess, I do have a wife."

"What is she like?"

"She's very beautiful," Xi said slowly. "She is quiet, graceful, and... she loves me." A wan smile spread across his face.

Azula marveled at the simple love in his words. Her heart ached that he had to leave her. "When do you get to see her next?" she said, looking at him. He was fairly young – maybe twenty-five or so, and was a particularly bright soldier, thus the rank of Sergeant at such a young age.

"Five months, Princess," he said in a stiff voice, staring straight ahead at the boy on the cart. "Five long months," he muttered.

Azula rubbed her eyes and slowly shook her head, trying not to cry anymore. "This boy -" she started, and then choked on her words as she pointed to Sokka. "This boy is the only person who has ever come close to understanding me, or even trying to."

Her voice escalated. "And he has been ripped from me. I don't understand why, or how. I just want him to wake." She paused. "That's it. You can tell the crew. You could tell the world, if you wanted to. I don't care if they know."

She contemplated saying the last phrase, wondering if it would completely undermine her authority, and then realized it didn't really matter. "I don't feel like myself without him anymore," she whispered.

Sergeant Xi rose to his feet with a grunt. "You're a very strong person, Princess, if you don't mind me saying," he told her hesitantly. "I hope your friend wakes up soon, but if he doesn't, your crew is at your command, as usual, and if you need someone to talk to or help you, don't be afraid to rely on someone else."

He hoped he hadn't gone too far with implications that she needed anyone's help, but she just stared dejectedly ahead.

"Thank you," she finally murmured, and shut her amber eyes again. Tears leaked from under them, and she said, "You're dismissed." Xi slowly left her chamber.

* * *

"We need to speak with King Bumi," said Aang in a firm voice, but the young man behind the counter was adamant in his refusal.

"No," he repeated. "Who do you think you are, anyway?"

Aang nearly breathed fire in his rage. Traveling undercover was the most unbelievably irritating thing he had to encounter, but there was good reason for it – every person more who knew he was the Avatar was another weak link that could be tortured into giving information.

The idiot they were speaking to was some middle-level member of the White Lotus Society who apparently took himself far too seriously.

"Listen here," Toph hissed, pushing Aang aside. Her eyes were cold as they stared at the man. "If you don't get us in to see King Bumi, I will make sure you personally regret it."

The guy raised his eyebrow and tried to glare back in a manner he thought seemed adequate. "I'm not allowed to let anyone through to see any of the Grand Masters, okay?"

"Well," Katara demanded, "are you allowed to tell them who wants to see them?"

The man rolled his eyes, looking around uncomfortably. "I guess I could do that, maybe."

"Okay," sighed Katara in relief, exchanging an exasperated glance with Aang. "Tell Bumi that Bonzu and June Pipinpadaloxicopolis have to see him."

"Immediately," Toph added with a death glare.

The man hurried away, muttering to himself.

"Thank the spirits he's gone," Aang groaned. "I hate going through the system. This is ridiculous!"

Katara placed a hand on his shoulder. "Just keep in mind that you have to stay hidden."

The airbender sighed. "I know," he said, "I just wish there were a better way."

Toph said, "Don't sweat it. Once we're in with the White Lotus, we'll get to do whatever we want, and you'll be totally safe. Even if this place is in Ba Sing Se." She made a face of distaste. Toph never shielded her hatred for the city.

Aang looked around the room, which masqueraded as a wine cellar below a store owned by a White Lotus member. The headquarters were spread out underground, managing to remain undetected by the Fire Nation officials that swarmed through Ba Sing Se. The secrecy was largely due to the fact that this cool, dingy wine cellar was the only entrance in or out of the labyrinthine headquarters.

Suddenly, the man hurried back out, seemingly breathless. "Yes, yes, come right in," he said, looking boredly at the group. "Unfortunately, Bumi is in a meeting right now, but you can meet with one of his regional officers for the time being to discuss some smaller matters."

"Great," Toph mumbled. "Someone else like you."

The man shot her a nasty glare. "Actually, he's younger than I am."

They all followed the man into the door concealed behind the racks of wine. They walked for what felt like five minutes or so, the tunnels smoothly rounded, cool grey stone winding around aimlessly.

Then, suddenly, they broke out into a large hall. Katara, Toph and Aang gaped. It was filled with bustling people who walked around in clumps, speaking in hushed voices. "You guys have been recruiting, I'm guessing," Katara said in awe.

The three were led into a small antechamber on the opposite side of the hall. Inside there were a few arched doorways. "Go into the door with the green gem above it," said their guide. "The officer is waiting in there for you, and when the meeting is over, he'll take you to see Bumi."

"Great, thanks," Toph deadpanned. The man walked out as if he had somewhere he desperately needed to be.

"I hope this regional officer isn't just some useless subordinate who doesn't know anything about anything," Katara groaned, knocking on the door. The archway above it had a green gem set into the stone.

"The door's open," called a voice. It sounded a little familiar.

Aang pushed open the heavy wooden door and the three walked in. Aang turned to shut the door behind him. It shut with a satisfying click.

Katara and Toph seemed oddly frozen, and when Aang saw who was sitting in front of them, he was just as dumbstruck. The boy sitting behind the desk had black hair and a vicious scar over his left eye, and he gazed at them, completely stricken, his mouth drifting open slightly.

* * *

"We've rounded the tip of the Northwest Chain," said the admiral. "We're pretty much on schedule, Princess. Do you have any further orders?"

"No, no," Azula replied, brushing away her hair. "Everything seems to be going favorably."

The admiral's grizzled features leered into a smile. "Of course, Princess. Only the best from your most loyal subjects."

"Save it," Azula replied boredly. "Go and polish your armor or something."

She waved her hand idly and the admiral left her quarters. Azula sighed. "They're all so unoriginal," she said aloud. "But I'm a little worried about this plan of mine."

Her amber eyes drifted onto Sokka, and she continued to speak. "You see, not only am I worried about the exact physics of flooding the entire North Pole, I'm experiencing a sort of moral quandary."

She slowly lifted herself from her chair, gliding gracefully to Sokka's side. She leaned over his limp form lazily, slowly pushing his hair back from his forehead. "Because you're not awake, I feel as if it would be immoral to attack your people and your culture."

She sighed. "I mean, would it even be any better if you were awake? I mean, of course it would be better if you were awake, but would I feel any less guilty?"

Her voice slowly echoed around her metal room. She closed her eyes and slowly leaned her cool forehead down to rest against his chest. "Please," she whispered, "just wake up."

"Agni help me," she sobbed, looking up at the ceiling, trying to keep the tears from spilling over her eyelids, but they flooded over anyway, dripping onto Sokka's smooth tan chest and sliding down slowly. "I need you," she said, and actually sort of liked the sound of the words. She placed her head back on his chest, comforting herself with the soft thumping of his heartbeat.

"Sokka," she said, the name resounding around the metal walls. She repeated it more loudly. "Wake up," she said, again and again, louder and louder until she was wailing it.

Defeated by his silence, Azula sat down hard on the ground, burying her face in her hands. What good was having everything she had always wanted if she couldn't have the one thing she needed?

* * *

"Zuko?" Aang said slowly. "Is this some sort of sick joke?"

"Um, no, actually," Zuko said, his low, scratchy voice full of dread. "I – I'm working for the White Lotus now. I left the palace months ago."

Katara gave a derisive laugh. "Well," she said in a loud, overly-cheerful voice, "isn't that fucking convenient!"

"Hey now, calm down," Aang said softly, placing a hand on her arm. "We can talk through this..."

"We can't talk through this!" Katara exploded. "If you want one person who's to blame for everything that's happened, it's this guy!" Her arm swung in an arc, ending up with an accusing finger pointed at Zuko. She lurched towards him in a sudden, short sprint, yanking water from her pouch.

"Katara?" Aang said. "Katara, no. Stop!"

He swung his hands up into a stance, and suddenly Katara was frozen in place. She struggled, turning her head to face him. "Aang!" she hissed through gritted teeth. "Let me go! Dammit!"

"No," Aang said, his voice shaking. "I understand what you're feeling. I'm feeling it too. And don't try to tell me I'm not, because Sokka is like a brother to me. But this is not going to be made right by doing something awful to Zuko."

"But -"

"No!" Aang snarled at Katara. "We are not going to stoop to stupid, rash decisions! Think, dammit! Think about it! So he got Sokka captured. But he's here now!"

"Yeah," Toph burst in, agreeing. "Look, Katara, if you don't trust Zuko, it means you're distrusting every grand master in there. Your waterbending teacher? King Bumi? I don't know about you, but I personally trust their judgment."

Aang let Katara go, his eyes remorseful. She fell to her knees. "Katara, you don't know how hard this is for me. I would give anything to be able to make Zuko feel the pain we've felt, but we can't. There's no way to do that. We have to let this go."

"You can't just let everything go," Katara said in a low, throaty voice. She stood back up shakily, her eyes filled with so much loathing that Zuko felt himself pinned in place by her gaze.

Toph breathed out. "Okay, Zuko. Tell us what's gone down since you betrayed us."

Zuko didn't know where to begin. He didn't know what he could say to possibly fix what he'd done – to make it forgivable. The worst part was knowing that he wouldn't forgive him, ever, if he were in their place.

He closed his eyes and swallowed. "I went back to the palace and was welcomed home like a hero. I finally felt like I was equal to my sister. I felt like I was where I belonged."

His eyes opened again, looking at Aang, Toph, Katara, his gaze pleading. "And then I realized everything was wrong. My uncle, the wisest man I knew, was somewhere in the heart of the Earth Kingdom, and I was part of the group that was trying to kill him. My sister took me to see your brother, and after that, I just couldn't – I couldn't live with myself."

Zuko's hands shook. "I tried poisoning myself, convincing myself it was better than what I was living as now. But it didn't even work." He looked down at his fingers, wringing them restlessly. "I woke up the next day thinking I would break your brother out of prison, but as I was taking my things and leaving, a guard saw me. It was the middle of the night, so he didn't realize it was me, and he tried to fight me."

Zuko placed his face in his hands. "I knocked him unconscious and locked him in a shed before running away. I just – I completely forgot about Sokka after that, and I only remembered after I was a mile away. I was going to come back, but I looked back and saw Mai and Ty Lee running after me, so I -"

His gaze faltered as he looked back up at the three people standing in front of him. Zuko felt mortified as he recognized the prickling of tears at his eyes. "You guys, I'm so sorry. I've been working as hard as I can to make things right. I know I've done everything wrong. I know you will probably never forgive me."

Aang swallowed. "Okay, one thing I need to know... was Sokka brainwashed?"

"No," Zuko said, frowning. "He seemed pretty lucid when I saw him."

"We were captured and held for a little under a month," Toph told Zuko, but she wasn't trying to make him feel guilty. "Before that, we saw Sokka once. He looked a complete mess. He seemed delirious, starved, bruised, injured, and just in general, not really human."

Toph swallowed. "Then, five days ago, we broke out using bloodbending and we were trying to find Sokka." She paused. "A kitchen boy told us he wasn't a prisoner, and we were told he had his own room."

She gesticulated fruitlessly, searching for words. "When we went to that room, we found him... and Azula..."

"I just don't understand it," Aang interrupted. "They were in bed together, Zuko. I have no idea what it means, or what was happening, but he didn't recognize us and he tried to protect her when we started attacking. He seemed to think he was from the Fire Nation."

Zuko looked completely repulsed. "What the hell?" he whispered. "I don't know, Aang. I know absolutely nothing about ... that. I know that before I left, Azula used to go down to the cells to torture him, but then she stopped for a while and just started to talk to him. I don't know what goes on in my sister's mind, honestly. Something's wrong... broken up in there."

Katara spluttered. "As if you're any better."

Zuko swallowed. "You're right," he said softly. "But things are being put right. I swear."

"How can you promise that?" Toph asked in a frigid voice.

Zuko looked up at her. "I promise," he said, his tone low and intense.

Suddenly, the door burst open. "Aang!" exclaimed King Bumi bombastically, swooping in through the archway. "I'm glad you're alright. We heard you had been captured! I suppose you just slithered right out like a slippery eel, though, eh?"

Aang smiled grimly. "Sure, Bumi," he said. "Come on. We have a lot to talk about."

* * *

Azula opened the door to her chamber, having just finished eating dinner with the crew.

The first thing she felt was terror. The table was empty. Sokka was gone. Sokka wasn't there, lying there, like he should have been. The next thing she felt was shock, as she saw him standing next to her bed.

Then, overwhelmingly, watery relief flooded her body. "Sokka?" she said weakly. "Are you really – are you awake?"

"Nah," Sokka said jovially. "I'm just standing up because I'm dead. Of course I'm awake, Azula."

She ran to him, throwing her arms around him and squeezing too tightly for him to move. "Spirits. Don't ever do that to me again," she hissed into his ear. His arms closed around her back.

"What?" he asked in a low voice. "Save you from getting hit by icy projectiles?"

"If it means this again, then by all means let me get hit," Azula murmured. Sokka let out a ripple of laughter, and then, predictably,

"I'm hungry!"

Azula broke from him, knowing she was grinning like a complete moron. "Should we go get something to eat?"

Sokka looked at her, and then looked at the door.

"No, screw that," he suddenly decided, and leaned forward to enclose Azula's lips in a dizzying kiss. She pushed back feverishly, heated passion and cool relief igniting their contact. Azula smiled and felt him smiling too, and she felt something light up in her that hadn't been there since he had been struck unconscious. Suddenly, she felt like she could do anything.

* * *

**Oof. Sorry, by the way, preemptively – I will probably be lacking on update speed for a while, seeing as I have rehearsal for All Shook Up 4 nights and 1 afternoon a week. Plus school. But I promise that there will be no more than two weeks between updates. That's a promise fersher. Sorry that this chapter was probably largely underwhelming, especially for the wait time.**

**-Speechwriter**


	12. Waiting for Others

**I owe you guys an apology. I did not update on time - my overcommitted life is kicking my ass. **

**I won't be able to update regularly, so don't hold your breath. You can start expecting more regular updates after the month of March is over, although I should be able to get one or two more chapters in there somewhere. I'm not going to make any promises as to time - it could be a week from now or four. **

**I'm very sorry for the overlong wait, but I hope the chapter is satisfactory. I definitely know where I'm going, anyway - I expect that this fic will reach completion around the 17 or 18 chapter mark.**

**Thanks so much for reading, and sorry about my unreliability XD**

* * *

"We're heading north at a good pace," Azula said, pointing to an island on the map, "and we're going to stop here to refuel today. I'm reasonably pleased with the crew and officers. They seem to be quite competent."

Sokka nodded. "Wow, that's high praise for you," he laughed, and Azula made a noncommittal noise. She rolled up the map tightly in one hand and placed it into a cabinet.

"By the way," Sokka said, in an uncharacteristically careful voice, "I have to ask you something."

Azula's heart was suddenly pounding. She told herself to get a grip, and then said, "Yes?"

Sokka swallowed, sitting down on the crimson bedspread. "Those three people – who were they? You obviously knew them. And that one girl said you knew something about my past. I mean," he said quickly, "I'm not saying I believe her more than you, but if there was any truth to what she was saying -"

"That girl is an international fugitive," Azula told Sokka. "They all are. That blind girl used to be a scam artist, and the tan girl helped attack the royal palace two years ago."

"How about the boy?" Sokka asked. "He had airbender tattoos – what is that? Is he actually an airbender?"

Azula felt herself getting chilly. This conversation was trespassing dangerously close to territory she didn't feel comfortable entering. She looked nervously from side to side. What if Sokka suddenly remembered something if she said anything about Aang being the Avatar? He had already heard all their names during the fight – would he react any differently to hearing the names from her mouth?

She took a deep breath. "That boy is the Avatar," she said. Sokka's eyes widened.

"What? He's just a kid!" exclaimed Sokka. "Is he really the Avatar?"

Azula nodded. "Fortunately, his way into the Avatar State itself is blocked by an injury, but he is still extremely dangerous."

"The other two were an earthbender and a waterbender," Sokka said. "What were they doing with him?"

"Friends, I suppose," said Azula idly. "Look, I have to go get the bearing of this ship from the captain for my log – can you wait a few minutes?"

Sokka nodded, and Azula exited, letting out a huge breath she didn't realize she was holding. Wow. That was close. She had felt under pressure. Extreme pressure.

She went up to see the captain, although she didn't need to see the bearing at all. She just needed to stay away from Sokka until the subject had left his mind, although, she didn't know how long that would be.

"Oh! There you are, Princess. A hawk just delivered this message from your father," said the lieutenant as she entered the navigation room.

"Lovely," she said, and took the letter, breaking the royal seal with a sharp fingernail and unrolling the paper.

_My esteemed daughter,_

_Our messengers have received word that the subversive White Lotus Society organization in Ba Sing Se has recruited nearly a tenth of the city population. Meanwhile, Omashu has experienced another uprising. I fear, Azula, that if we do not make haste with the downfall of the Northern Water Tribe, the rest of the world may break free at the seams._

_However, the downfall must not only subdue the Earth Kingdom – it must terrify them. Fear, as you know, is the only reliable way of manipulation. We need to make a strong, decisive strike, Azula. The Fire Nation must reign supreme, and it is for this reason that I order you to exterminate the population of the Northern Water Tribe. You are intelligent and driven. I assume you will find a way to do so, if it means a siege longer than the legendary defeat of Iroh, if it means a more brutal extinction than that of the Air Nomads._

_If you are unsuccessful in this mission, you will suffer banishment. The mission is everything. You of all people should understand._

_Reinforcements are at hand if you have need of them. Do not write until you can send me a message affirming that every last Water Tribe savage has been struck from the face of the planet. Ever since the Southern Water Tribe joined with the North, they have been an insufferable pain in my foot. I eagerly await the good news._

_Fire Nation victorious,_

_Fire Lord Ozai_

Azula stared blankly at the page, the words glaring at her accusingly. She rolled it up briskly and stuck it in her pocket, breathing rather harder than before. Looking up at her crew, she snarled, "What are you all staring at?"

Their heads snapped back around, and Azula left the cabin. She barged into the nearest room, which appeared empty, shutting the door with a satisfying clunk. It was quiet inside until she let out a scream of rage, blasting fire onto the ceiling, scorching it black.

"Princess?" said a voice timidly, and Azula reflexively pointed two fingers wildly at the voice.

"Oh, it's you," Azula said dryly, seeing that the speaker was Sergeant Xi. She lowered her hand slowly. "Sorry about that. I received some distressing news from my father."

He knew better than to ask what it was before she offered to tell. Instead, he stood in silence as she looked around the room.

"What exactly are you doing?" she asked him.

"Cleaning, Princess," Xi replied. "It's only a storage room, but space is space, especially on a ship that's going to be taking so many prisoners so soon."

Azula swallowed. She opened her mouth to tell him about what Ozai had written, but no sooner had she decided to save that information for later than she saw something strange in the corner of the room. "What's that?" she muttered, walking towards it. She pulled it out of its place where it was buried in a pile of useless junk.

It was a piece of blue-grey metal, bent at a right angle. She tested the edge. It was sharp. "This is dangerous," she said. "What type of weapon is this? I've never even seen one of these before."

"Not sure," replied Sergeant Xi. "I think, Princess, that it was on the person of one of our captives months and months ago."

"Some sort of foreign weaponry, I suppose," Azula murmured, turning the bent metal over in her hands. "Oh, well. Make sure you don't cut yourself on that," she said, tossing it carelessly back on the pile.

* * *

Bumi shivered. "We knew about some of those things, Aang, but the fact that your young friend is in Fire Nation custody is not good! No, not good at all," he said in an uncharacteristically serious tone.

"No," Master Pakku agreed. "Anything they have – anything at all – is a weakness. The fact is, now that you're here, it's very unwise to leave again, because you would have information about us that could potentially be taken from you."

Katara's lip curled into a snarl. "Are you telling us that we shouldn't try and rescue my brother? My brother, who's aided this war effort ever since he was a kid?"

"That's exactly what we're saying," said Jeong Jeong, staring at Aang, Katara and Toph levelly. "You have to keep your heads. You have to stay calm. This is no time for rash decisions and unwise choices."

Katara laughed. "Unwise choices, you say, but you somehow found reason to bring a certain Prince Zuko into this organization?"

"I will thank you not to speak ill of my nephew, as he has, in the last few months, done significantly more to aid this war efforts than any of you," Iroh said in a strong voice, and suddenly there was silence in the room. Katara looked down at her feet, swallowing. It was so unfair. That spoiled prince continued to be spoiled, while her brother was captured by the Fire Nation. Surely Iroh of all people should understand what it was like to be away from family...

Aang stepped forward, clearing his throat. Katara felt a rush of hope, but it was squashed by Aang's words. "Thank you for your wisdom," Aang said in a soft voice, bowing to each of the masters. "Please, if there is anything we can do to assist the war effort... tell us."

Bumi faced Aang once more. "There are some comfortable rooms that I'm sure will suit you – and they're newly refurbished, too! Just go straight back into the lobby and find the room with the red jewel. I bet 'jewel' find your lodgings very satisfactory." At his pun, Bumi let out a snorting, wheezing laugh, but Aang didn't crack a smile. He merely bowed again and left the room, ushering his friends after him.

Katara tried to open her mouth, but found that she couldn't. Then she realized that Aang was holding her mouth shut with bloodbending. Only now did she see an ugly, mutinous expression break out on her friend's face. Katara looked over at Toph, who shrugged.

Behind the arch with the red jewel was a huge dome that dwarfed them all. Arches, too numerous to imagine the number, lined the walls. Before one of the attending earthbenders could offer to assist their search for a vacant room, Aang stomped hard on the ground, and a column of stone took them up to one of the arches. They all stepped carefully from the column into the archway. Behind it was a simple room with a bed, a tub, a screen, and a simple wall hanging with the emblem of the white lotus woven onto it.

Katara felt her lips relax and knew that Aang had loosened his grip. Aang, however, had walked over to the bed and was sitting on it with an infuriated expression. Katara looked at Toph once more, and Toph said, "You okay, Twinkletoes?"

"No!" yelled Aang suddenly, leaping to his feet. He paced around furiously. "Dammit! They want us to stay here and not get hurt, not get out there and do some real help."

"How did you come up with that?" asked Toph, bewildered.

"Didn't you hear them?" Aang spat. "They said it was unwise to leave again. And then put some bullshit excuse after it. But they just don't want us to leave because they're afraid the Avatar will get hurt. And you guys are getting roped into it because of me. You're always getting roped into everything because of me!"

Katara swallowed. "Come on, Aang, I'm sure it's not as bad as -"

"Yes, it is!" Aang bellowed, turning around and punching a massive blast of flame into the paper screen, making it erupt into flame.

Katara's nimble hands drew water from the tub and doused the screen. "Aang," she said forcefully, and he stopped to look at her, his grey eyes stormy, his eyebrows furious. "If we want to leave, we can leave," she said softly.

Toph nodded in agreement. "Come on, Twinkletoes, do you really think some old fuddy-duddies could keep the Avatar, the best earthbender alive, and a waterbending master from leaving?"

The anger drained from Aang's face, leaving him with a sort of sad expression. "I just – I wanted to get Sokka back," he muttered, casting a furtive glance at Katara, "because you guys are so torn up about him. I mean, not that I'm not – but I think he'll be safe, at least, as long as he's not a prisoner. And – it's just – I don't want to sit here and have to think about where he is, and how he's doing."

Katara swallowed, shaking back her dark hair with a brave attempt at some semblance of unconcern. "I agree," her voice said shakily, and Toph let out an affirmative grunt. "I think we should focus on something other than Sokka."

"Yeah," Toph said. "We should focus on getting the Fire Nation out of places that don't belong to it. For good."

* * *

Sokka frowned. Azula had just read him the letter from her father, and he didn't like it. Not a bit.

"I don't know, Azula," he said uneasily. "I mean, would you really kill all those people? Those are families out there. They have sisters and brothers and sons and daughters. And lovers."

Azula swallowed, turning her golden gaze on him. "I mean, what am I supposed to do?" she laughed. "He's threatening exile! I know killing is wrong, especially without reason, but if this would make my father sane again, I -"

"You what?" Sokka demanded. "You would really kill people for the sake of your father's questionable sanity?"

Azula glared at him, her face curling up in anger. "And what if I would?" she snapped.

"Then I'd sure as hell question your sanity!" Sokka raged in return.

They stood there for a split second before starting to apologize simultaneously.

They both lay down on the bed, staring up into the red canopy, wondering why there wasn't an easy answer.

Azula closed her eyes. Sokka's relatives were up there in the North Pole. Oh, god. She would be destroying his whole life – his culture, his people, his family. What if the Avatar and his gang were in the North Pole, too? His friends would be wiped from the face of the earth. And though Azula liked the idea of not being bothered by Sokka's little crew, she couldn't say she wanted them dead.

This was so much more complicated for her than it was for Sokka, Azula thought with envy. He was blissfully oblivious to her thought process.

Meanwhile, Sokka was still wondering about how he himself knew those three criminals. He didn't exactly want to bring them up – the mention of them seemed to agitate Azula a little more than she was willing to let on – but he really wished he knew who they were. They seemed very passionate about making him come with them. Suddenly, he almost wished he had just gone with them.

Then he realized how ridiculous that was, and felt sort of guilty. Azula had only ever been kind to him. Kind, generous, and –

And suddenly he was slipping from the bed, his hand throwing itself out to catch him on the cold metal floor, his head aching with the sudden burn of remembrance.

It wasn't much, but it was something. A mental image of a huge city – he recognized it almost instantly as Ba Sing Se, from the history books – and then a sudden picture of those three people, and Sokka himself, arranged on some sort of brown thing on top of something huge and white. The same thing that had flown off with those three on its back that night...

Then, a crack of light shining through a door, and the grit of sand in his mouth, and darkness everywhere.

Azula grabbed his shoulder. "Sokka!" she said, shaking him none too gently. "What is it?"

The sudden ache subsided. Sokka shook his head. "Just remembered some things. Saw Ba Sing Se, those three people from your room on top of some giant white and brown thing, and some dark scene..."

"What dark scene?" Azula said sharply, with what Sokka thought was unnecessary urgency.

"I don't know," he mumbled, "just a pitch-black room with a door about to open. Don't know why I'd remember that. I wish I could draw all this stuff – I hardly remember what that man from my first memory-thingy looked like."

He slowly got back to his feet, massaging his temples gently. "Azula," he sighed, "I can't – I can't deal with this. I absolutely have to find out who I am."

It was something he had been thinking about for a while. Azula didn't seem like she was telling him everything, and he knew he could not force her to. The only weapon he had left was his absence – the girl had said herself that she'd rather be hit by an attack than lose him again, and although Sokka definitely didn't like the idea of any sort of sneaky manipulation, what choice did he have? Remembering hurt. It hurt like a stab to the heart, and the disjointed images he managed to pull from his mind didn't give him a clue as to... anything, really, at all.

"Deal with what?" Azula asked softly, her ebony eyebrows leaning down into a slight frown.

Sokka closed his eyes. "Being. Living. Without an identity."

"You have an identity," Azula insisted feverishly, reaching up and gripping his shoulder desperately. "You're strong, intelligent, dedicated, a fighter. You're funny, sarcastic, you love food. I... I love you. I wouldn't love you if you weren't a person."

Sokka looked at her sadly. He couldn't fathom that she might not actually understand what he was saying. It didn't seem like her. But she was acting quite genuine...

"Azula," he said, "imagine that you could remember nothing before two months ago."

Azula swallowed. She wished she could.

"That would be great," she sighed.

Sokka grimaced. "Right..." he said awkwardly, scratching his head. Azula's childhood hadn't been exactly ideal.

It was then that he entertained the notion that perhaps he wasn't missing much. Maybe his childhood had been terribly abusive. Perhaps the mere shock of being removed from jail had wiped his memory. Maybe he had no friends, and no family, and he really was alone, except for Azula.

Maybe that wouldn't be too bad.

But then – how did those three benders fit into the equation? How did he know international fugitives? How could he, Sokka, possibly be associated with anything abnormal? Surely he would remember it.

Surely.

* * *

"We really don't want to hear it," said Toph tiredly, "or at least not now. I mean, I for one am all for giving you a second chance, but these guys here? Not so much."

Katara merely gave the cowering Zuko a death glare that could have shocked the socks off a moose-lion. Aang sighed. "Not true, Toph," he countered idly, "but I just don't think – like, seriously, Zuko, if you were me, or Katara or Toph, would you, or they, trust you?"

Zuko paused, trying to figure out the question, but before he could fully understand it, Aang said, "I didn't think so."

"For now, you should probably just leave us alone," Toph advised, blowing her hair out of her face. "Oh, and by the way, if you see anyone important, it'd be nice to be able to get out of this place and do something, if you get my drift."

"Actually, that was what I was here about," Zuko said finally. They hadn't let him get a word in edgewise.

All three heads snapped up to face him. Zuko was taken aback. "We need you to sabotage some Fire Nation weapons," continued Zuko uneasily.

"I'd like to sabotage some Fire Nation _soldiers_ about now," growled Katara, standing up. "I swear – four days of absolutely nothing."

Zuko shrugged, trying nervously to seem relaxed. "I guess this is your chance," he said with a feeble smile. "There's a fleet of ships, now, um, right off the coast next to the eastern wall. We need a metalbender. Toph. But, uh, we also need a great waterbender and an air supply, so you guys are pretty much... yeah..."

Toph and Aang stood up to join Katara. "Great," Aang said.

As if the words were insects dropping from her lips, Katara said, "Thank you, Zuko."

With another venomous death glare, the three exited their room.

Zuko thought about calling over an earthbender to help him get down, but instead sat down on the squashy straw bed. He was experiencing the greatest loneliness he had ever felt. He never saw his uncle – Iroh was always in meetings, rarely even having time for his beloved tea anymore – and Zuko had no friends, although that wasn't exactly a change from usual.

It was eating away at him. Everything about... everything... was overwhelming and unbearable. He couldn't think about Sokka without feeling sick, and he couldn't look at Katara without thinking of Sokka, and he couldn't talk to Aang without being reminded of Sokka. Perhaps the only one he could hypothetically get along with was Toph, and she was sort of scary to Zuko.

Everyone else in the White Lotus Society headquarters was from the Earth Kingdom, despising Zuko on principle. The slightly more accepting Water Tribe members were scattered across the Earth Kingdom, instigating rebellions in small towns and helping overturn small-scale Fire Nation operations.

Even though Katara despised him so much, she still spoke to him more than most other members of the White Lotus did. It was very much the cool thing to do in the ranks to avoid the banished prince completely, and it was tiring for the 21-year-old.

There was apparently some sort of secret operation that was being undertaken with some sort of immediacy, but Zuko wasn't allowed to know about it. No one was. Helplessness frustrated Zuko, and he was swamped in it. He couldn't even go out in public due to the scar.

And Mai – the calm, compassionate girl with the icy exterior whom he had known so well? She was probably still tracking him. He didn't think he would ever be forgiven. Not ever.

* * *

A week passed. The steamship trucked resolutely through the icy water. Sokka had the bright idea to insert filters into the smokestacks, as the ashes floating through the air dyed the snow a distinctive black. Problem solved.

He had had a few flashbacks – three more in total: One of the airbender and the waterbender, one of the earthbender and some girl with short brown hair and blue eyes, and a final image of that door opening just a little more in that blackened room. He puzzled over who the people were, but Sokka found himself most intrigued by the dark room. What was it? When he had the flashbacks themselves, he tasted grit and felt dampness in his knees, but nothing at all could be seen.

Sokka and Azula stood on the deck, wrapped in red furs that protected from the vicious cold. Sokka found that he rather liked the brisk, icy breeze, and he was shocked to find that he could regurgitate some basic steering principles of dodging ice floes. This surprised every crew member, but Sokka himself most of all. Perhaps he was a world traveler, having become mixed up with international crime? Thus the fugitives, and the ice?

That was his current vague assumption.

Azula leaned over the side of the boat, looking into the deep, clear water. "I wonder what could be down there," she sighed almost wistfully.

"A lot of darkness, looks like," Sokka said sagely, and Azula shoved him. He chuckled. "I mean, if you want to find out, I could throw you overboard," he suggested, receiving another shove.

The sky was a gorgeous, bright blue, punctuated by not a single cloud, interrupted only by the arching tendrils of white ice that reached upwards every once in a while. They seemed to be more frequent than they were an hour ago.

Then, suddenly,

"Princess!"

Azula wheeled around, all business once more. "Yes?"

"We are only half a mile from the glacier that includes the Water Tribe," said the officer standing in front of them. "Do you have any orders?"

Azula nodded. "Pull over to the nearest face of the glacier that is around the corner from the entrance itself. Maximum camouflage," she said briskly, peering into the distance. Her eyes brightened as she saw the great ice wall rising far away. "As soon as we stop the ships, make a way up to the top of the glacier."

"But Princess, that would be a climb of a few hundred feet up a solid wall of -"

"No excuses!" hissed Azula and turned back around. The conversation was over.

Sokka looked down at Azula, feeling uneasy. At first, he had been sure that she would defy the ridiculous rule of her father. He had been sure that her moral values would overturn orders. Now he wasn't quite so sure, and there was something about the entire situation that didn't feel right at all.

"Hey, listen," Sokka said, "are you thinking about -"

"I'm debating," Azula interrupted. "Orders are orders. My country is my country. My father is my father."

Sokka sighed, rubbing his eyes tiredly. This wasn't sounding good.

Azula averted her gaze, wishing he would not ask about this. There was so much he couldn't know about the situation, so much he didn't and could not understand.

The tall ice barrier seemed to stare accusingly at the ship as it navigated around the side of the magnificent glacier. Azula's golden eyes were glazed blue as she looked into the sky, praying to the spirits for some sort of guidance. How could she betray her family? But even more – how could she betray all these innocent civilians? As uneducated and vicious, as dangerous as they might be, among their number were innocents who had never hurt a fly. Innocent, like Ty Lee. Innocent, like Mai's baby brother.

Azula's lips tugged down, and she forced back tears.

Innocent, like Azula had never been given the chance to be.

She was still a teenager. How could she be asked to make these decisions? She was so young. She suddenly felt so young, and so vulnerable.

Then, as Sokka retreated back into the ship, she practiced for hours.

She thought a lot more than she usually did while practicing. Usually, she had to concentrate, giving herself the utmost benefit of focus. But now only images of Sokka would make themselves appear when she tried to shake her head of thoughts, and then she had no choice but to address her feelings.

He was becoming less... innocent. The more they stayed on the water, the more he seemed to harden, become worldly. He spent quite a bit of time around the crew – he was fascinated by steamboats, their functions, and the jobs of the crewmen. He even started helping them clear out the rooms, wordlessly ignoring the fact that there wouldn't be any prisoners, in hypothesis, to store in those rooms.

While his previous innocence had managed to break Azula's heart back into use, this seriousness he had was strangely magnetic. When he was determined, it reminded her strangely of how unbreakable he had been back in the prison days... back in the days when she had tortured him for sport...

Azula's leg snapped out into a vicious kick that fired a flame across the deck of the ship, hitting the glacier with a slow hiss and a puff of steam.

She landed, panting, and felt her eye dripping an unwanted tear. Furious with its existence, she wiped it with the back of her hand and watched it sizzle away. His constant determination was so admirable. How could she possibly tear away everything he was trying to find?

* * *

"So, what type of project are we talkin' here?" Toph asked, looking at Zuko expectantly.

Zuko shrugged. "My uncle hasn't really been able to tell me much. I just know it keeps absorbing a lot of their time and they keep holding these meetings where they keep yelling at each other."

"Can you hear what they've been saying?" Aang asked curiously.

"Just bits and pieces," Zuko said, "but there's something about some sort of combat force and not knowing whether to assemble it. I don't know why they'd hesitate to organize a force, though." He hit the table lightly with his fist, straightening up with blank mystification on his face.

Katara made a light hmph noise, glancing at Zuko with a guarded, carefully blank look on her face.

Aang sighed, his grey eyes flickering to the ceiling as he lay on the bed. "Well, hopefully if they have to make this force soon, we'll be in on it."  
"We better be," Toph growled.

Zuko smiled uneasily. "I guess the fact that we're not doing anything is, um, good? Probably means that everything's going... pretty okay?"

A light rumble outside, and on a hexagonal column of stone rose into view Zuko's uncle. "Zuko," he said, "you should be back in your office. I appreciate that you are informing our friends, but there are some administrative issues that do need tending."

Zuko nodded wordlessly and left the chamber.

Toph sighed. "Man. He feels so guilty it's annoying," she muttered.

Aang agreed, "I think he should just forgive himself. What's happened has happened."

But in the corner of the room, Katara was retying her hair and shaking her head. "I'm glad he can't forget," she said. "I'm glad he's suffering."

The truth was, though, that Katara didn't see him suffering enough. He didn't seem to be undergoing the pain that either of the others had undergone. She exhaled heatedly through her nose and tried to calm herself, thinking of how well Sokka had looked the last time she had seen him, discounting the ice needles, discounting how he had been protecting his greatest enemy. Hell, when Jet had been under mind control, he wasn't mistreated at all. Katara had managed, mostly, to convince herself that Sokka was absolutely fine. After all, what would doing otherwise accomplish?

* * *

Azula climbed up to the top of the glacier, which took nearly twenty minutes and exhausted the princess. She stood at the top completely out of breath, surveying the makeshift camp the men had set up. It was for strategic purposes only – they returned to the steamboats for eating, sleeping, and the like. Azula still had not had the heart to tell the crew what would be happening – or what her father wished to happen.


	13. Smash

**Numair:**

**Wow. I can't say I'm not taken aback by your review – the magnitude of the thing could be an entire work in itself XD. Thank you for your constructive criticism and blunt honesty, regardless of the derision that littered your comments.**

**I don't generally address reviews with specific points, but I would like to say a few things:**

**1) I disagree with you about Toph's character. I believe she would stay if one of her friends was gravely injured; Aang's having a "stable" condition just means he's not about to die instantly. With an injury like that, the outcome is never certain. His fragility is sustained throughout the entire post-accident interim. Toph's a pretty wild and free character, but that doesn't keep her from wanting to keep her friends safe.**

**2) Katara's main opposition to bloodbending, in my mind, was due to the childish innocence and fundamental goodness that characterized the Gaang in general in the series. The Gaang I picture in my mind has lost a lot of that innocence – like Katara showed in the Southern Raiders. She could obviously be ruthless and use the powers she had, and because they were attempting to break out of the Fire Nation Palace, with Azula and countless guards in it, I would like to believe that the Gaang would cover every loophole. I think that as Katara matured, she would realize that bloodbending was rather a useful extra tool, and although it had the potential for evil, she would trust Aang not to be usurped by its grasp.**

**3) I disagree that Aang isn't as powerful as Katara. He's the Avatar. He was built to be the best at what he does, and that's to bend all four elements. He has to have enough power to maintain balance between four nations, for Christ's sake. Even if you just look at stuff that's canon – he masters stuff it took Katara ages to learn. Jeong Jeong says he has "never seen such raw power". Etc.**

**4) Yes, I made a mistake with Stockholm Syndrome and have been too lazy to rectify it. It didn't even cross my mind that the term had earthly implications when I was writing that piece. To me, they're just more words.**

**5) On the Avatar State: I just assumed it had remained closed up by the Azula lightning wound – if it's been three years, there's no way he wouldn't have seen fit to unlock it by now unless it was still impossible. Perhaps there's a bit of research deficiency on my part – I'll go back and read up on the effects of the lightning wound; I thought that the Avatar State could still be triggered involuntarily, just not controlled, because of the erratic flow of energy through that area. Eh, I always thought him walking backwards into a rock was a bit of a BS way for him to unlock the Avatar State, anyway.**

**6) The Toph-wooden-cage thing was a bit of a stretch, definitely. That's definitely on my to-rework list.**

**7) I appreciate the time and effort you took to review my work, but just keep in mind that phrases like "bad writing aside" are more than slightly disrespectful. I don't appreciate your disdain. If you warn me that I'm not supposed to take your review too seriously, I'd like you not to take yourself seriously enough to make blanket statements like that. It rather undermines instances when you say things like "this story deserves an ending", because if I write things that make you, and I quote, "want the slam [your] head into a wall", why should I keep writing at all, let alone finish out the story? I'm not a hypersensitive person, but I, like any other writer, see no reason or purpose for unnecessary and embittering critiques.**

**That aside – there have been a lot of comments and questions about how exactly the ambush happened. I've had the idea in my head since pretty much the beginning, but I suppose its logicality was lost in the transition to paper, so hopefully some clearing up will be undertaken briefly and swiftly.**

**As always, thanks to my reviewers and readers. And this time, apologies for this atrociously-sized opening.**

**-Speechwriter**

* * *

_"Of course, of course!" exclaimed the lady. "Come right in. I do hope you aren't freezing to death out there."_

_Aang cast a nervous look back out into the woods, hoping they weren't being followed. They weren't terribly far from the Fire Nation palace. Meanwhile, Sokka flashed their host a winning smile. "So," Sokka said, "what sorts of meats do you find out here?"_

_While the two struck up a comfortable conversation about cured squirrel-rabbit meat, Zuko and Aang went to unload their things. Zuko grinned awkwardly at Aang. "Nice to be sleeping inside for a change, huh?"_

_Toph shoved past them, grumbling, "Man, I can't see anything in here. I hate houses, and I hate wooden floors, and I hate -"_

_Katara laughed, steering the stumbling Toph into the girls' room. Aang and Zuko found their way to the other guest bedroom with relative ease. When they returned to the front room, the lady said, "I hope you found your rooms alright – no one's been in those since my husband left me years ago."_

_There was an awkward silence. Suddenly, Sokka let out a huge and impolite yawn, standing up and stretching. Zuko shot him a glare and said, "Well, we really appreciate your hospitality. If there's anything we can do for you in return, just ask us."_

_With that, the boys retired to their room. It was late – slightly after midnight, probably – and they were exhausted from a day of traveling. Sokka was snoring practically before his head hit the pillow. Aang sat on his bed in relief, navigating himself beneath the sheets with a sigh. Zuko glanced at him. "I'm really thirsty," Zuko told him. "Don't wait up – I'm going to see if that lady has any juice, uh, or something."_

_Aang nodded sleepily._

_The next thing he knew, he was awakened by a yell. Disoriented, he fell out of bed onto the hard wooden floor, blinking frantically in the darkness. Zuko still wasn't back, and Sokka was ducking behind his bed, swinging his sword madly, warding away the small objects flying towards him. Aang's heart thudded in his chest. There was a fire nation soldier outlined in the door. A fire nation soldier. Here._

_The soldier didn't seem to see Aang, so the airbender stood up and fired a huge blast of air at the man, which knocked him completely out of the doorframe. Leaping over the bed, he leaned backwards against the door, bracing it. "What were those things?" he said to Sokka furiously._

_"Darts," gasped Sokka. "Probably either poison or knockout. They're probably – they're probably going for the girls."_

_"Katara," breathed Aang. Suddenly, their door rattled with the weight of a fire nation soldier or two, dislodging Aang's frame slightly. Sokka came over to help him brace the door, but Aang waved him away. "Get that window open," he hissed quietly. Sokka nodded, fled to the window, and opened it with some difficulty. It was squeaking and rusty, and barely big enough to fit him out. Aang motioned for Sokka to get out, even as he held the door fast._

_Sokka scrambled out of the window. Aang slowly heated the doorknob until it was red-hot, and then sprang out the window after Sokka. Moments later, the cry of pain was heard from the man who had grabbed the doorknob._

_Aang looked from side to side. "This way," he whispered desperately, creeping towards Katara and Toph's room. Standing up, he pulled open the window. The girls were sleeping inside._

_"Katara," Aang whispered loudly. "Katara! We're being ambushed!"_

_Katara opened her eyes and said groggily, "What?"_

_"Get out of there!" Aang hissed, his face the image of agonizing fear. Katara shook herself awake, bolted out of bed, roused Toph, and grabbed their pack just as the locked doorknob started rattling. As the girls vaulted through the window, Aang and Sokka started sprinting towards the woods. Toph and Katara followed._

_"How did they find us?!" Toph panted._

_Aang nearly tripped in his sudden realization. "Zuko," he breathed, stopping his sprint. "He betrayed us..."_

_"There's no time! Run!" Katara urged._

_Suddenly, a gruff voice echoed behind them. "Stop!" it said. _

_Sokka cast a glance over his shoulder. "It's them," he said forlornly. Toph raised her hand to earthbend, but suddenly a volley of darts came whizzing towards them and she was shoved behind Katara for protection. One dart struck the back of Sokka's calf, and he collapsed in agony._

_"Sokka!" yelled Katara. She tried to haul him to his feet._

_They were in a woody clearing, and as the four stood against a huge oak tree, their foes advanced. Sokka was too tall for any of the others to carry him out of the way._

_Zuko walked into sight._

_"You," spat Katara. "How dare you come here? How dare you walk in here and watch this happen? After you planned it all?"_

_Zuko's look was downcast, even though he didn't appear to be listening to what Katara was saying._

_Aang struggled to lift Sokka, although the Water Tribe boy was significantly heavier than he was. The fire nation soldiers opposite them – there were six or seven – slowly advanced. Sokka's face convulsed in pain as his shot leg brushed the oak tree, and he stumbled backwards, bracing himself, unbalancing Aang. Then the soldiers attacked. They fired indiscriminately, lighting the dark clearing with the sounds and smells of fire._

_"Run!" Sokka hissed to Aang._

_Katara looked stricken. "We're not leaving you!" she yelled over the crackling, spreading flame. She slashed a bloody line down the face of a soldier who tried to attack Sokka. "Don't you even suggest that!"_

_"We're not just going to leave you here, Sokka," grunted Toph as she punched a rock into a red-clad stomach._

_"You have to!" Sokka said. "I can't walk. I can hardly even move. You have to get out of here. If they get all of us, it's over. I'll be -"_

_"No, you're not going to be fine!" yelled Aang. "If they take you back to the palace, do you have any idea -"_

_Suddenly, a burst of flame ripped through their tight-knit group and latched onto the old, dry oak. Sokka gasped and tumbled forward, throwing out an arm for balance, and as soon as it was done, a flailing chain wrapped around his wrist, pulling him backwards away from his friends. Acrid smoke poured out of the tree._

_Katara whipped water out of her pouch, aiming to cut the chain, but another came flying at her, the iron whistling in the cold air. She dodged it swiftly. Soon enough, chains were being cast at them from each of the soldiers. It seemed that as soon as they could cut them, more appeared._

_Toph yelled, "Stand back!"_

_She lifted her hands and, using metalbending, yanked on all of the chains simultaneously. Their metal links tugged towards her, pulling the soldiers onto the ground as yards and yards of chain were summoned to Toph. She grabbed the end of Sokka's chain and pulled as hard as she could. He was nearly unconscious now, but he made a feeble effort to follow his chain towards the others._

_Then, a sudden, vicious blast of fire severed the links. The soldiers were back on their feet._

_Toph, Aang, and Katara were hopelessly outnumbered. Half of the soldiers were raising dart-pipes to their lips. "This is bad," Katara whispered to Aang. "This is really bad."_

_Sokka raised his eyes to theirs, and in the darkness they could still make out the pleading glare. His lips slowly mouthed the word "go", and his eyes flickered over to the prince, who was standing in the shadows, disgust on his face. Then Sokka's head slumped onto the ground._

_"We'll intercept them and get Sokka back before they can reach the palace," Aang said. "For now – we have to go."_

_Toph nodded and the three turned, sprinting away._

_Thundering footfalls pursued them through the woods. They got closer with each minute of running._

_Aang saw the edge of the woods quite close ahead and turned his head, still sprinting full force. He raised his hand._

_Four things happened very quickly._

_Three darts met Aang's chest, knocking him unconscious before he could say a word._

_Aang's legs gave out just as they reached the edge of the woods._

_Katara screamed, "Aang! Stop!"_

_Aang's limp body careened over the cliff edge right beyond the edge of the woods._

_Frozen stiff in horror, Katara stared at the blank space on the cliff where his body had just been. Then, Toph stamped, hard, sending the square of earth on which they stood rocketing downwards towards the ground._

_Katara gazed downwards. There was no way to catch up. It was hard to realize – there was no way to catch up. No way..._

_"Toph, forget it!" she screamed. "Just soften the ground or something!"_

_"I can't!" Toph yelled back. "There's no way to do that!"_

_In desperation, Katara reached out her hands, took a breath, and focused, bringing water out of the very air. Aang was mere feet from the ground._

_Her nimble fingers collected the water into a platform under Aang's falling form, and she was seconds away from freezing it into ice when there was a terrible noise of a body hitting the earth. A tremendous crack, like every bone in his body had broken. A tremendous crack that had a note of finality._

Aang woke in a cold sweat, the beads of moisture trickling down his back with a faint prickle. He wiped them away angrily and felt the wound on his back rough under his fingertips. Old scars from old years... They never faded.

Aang wondered how Zuko could stand having his past written all over his face.

He slowly leaned back on the pillow and stared blankly into the darkness, unable to fall asleep again. He could just remember Sokka with them like it was yesterday. Before he could stop it, a tear leaked from his eye. He wiped it away angrily and turned over, waiting for sleep to engulf him.

* * *

Azula lay in bed. It was mid-afternoon on the top of the glacier; the world was grey snow, with their camp a splash of Fire Nation red on the tundra. Sokka was down at the ship, still helping clean, although he knew there was no reason for it. Most of the men were idling around camp, waiting for orders that Azula was not giving. She felt pinned. She didn't know what to do.

Every so often she would walk to the edge of the glacier and peer down at the Water Tribe, far below. She saw children running around, saw teenagers laughing and walking down the icy piers in their furs. She never saw anything that needed persecution – not with hours of observation – so she always slunk back to camp.

There was an easy way to get rid of them – poison the water. There was so much water around that it wouldn't be difficult. Admittedly, once poisoning was evident, they would start taking water from the glacier itself, which would be difficult to plan – but it would take out a lot of them. A lot of them, including children. Harmless innocents.

Azula shut her eyes and drifted into sleep, dreaming uncomfortably. She needed to make a decision soon – her father would not take kindly to receiving no letter in response to his command.

* * *

Sokka sighed. This room, according to Sergeant Xi, was so utterly messy that he had abandoned his effort to clean it. Slowly, the metal door creaked open. Sokka's jaw nearly hit the floor. There was so much clutter in there it was hard to believe there was a floor under it. Or walls behind it.

He absentmindedly started to organize all of it into little piles, thinking deeply all the while. Something struck him as oddly familiar about this room, now that he looked around it. It was a very strange shape – pentagonal, with a high, arched ceiling. He didn't know why it would be familiar, though. This happened a lot – the first time he heard about the White Lotus Society, he nearly corrected them and asked if they meant the Order of the White Lotus. Then he wondered how he knew that at all.

He moved a few things. Azula... could she ever really consider doing that to an entire culture? He weighed what he knew about her. If she really thought it would mean the destruction of her whole life...

No. He didn't think she could do it. She was not a cold-blooded, heartless person. That was a ridiculous notion. Sokka thought she was probably just wondering how to break the news to her father.

* * *

Azula slowly unrolled the parchment.

My esteemed father and Fire Lord, she wrote, and then stopped. Suddenly, her resolve hardened into iron. She didn't have to do this. She absolutely would not. Ignoring the consequences, she wrote a foot and a half-long letter explaining to her father why she absolutely would not do this, leaving out the parts involving Sokka. Her father still didn't know about Sokka...

She reread it. Upset balance. Worldwide revolt. Outrage of Fire Nation soldiers and civilians. The list of reasons went on, and yet, somehow, Azula was not sure if her father would be convinced.

She needed Sokka's opinion. Leaving the letter, signed but not sealed, on her desk, she left her tent to go to the long ladder that led down to the boat.

* * *

Having reassured himself, Sokka squatted down to move some more deeply buried items, but something fell off a teetering stack and hit him on the head.

"Ow!" he hissed, touching the back of his head. That thing was most definitely made out of metal. He turned to see what it was, and as he did, something else fell off the stack – a blue garment, sort of like a robe, folded neatly. A strange swordlike thing followed after, a round blue stone set into its blade.

And as he held up the robe, taking the sword in his hand, he saw what was beneath.

Boomerang.

What he had been waiting for since he could remember finally happened.

He keeled to the floor in sudden pain, curled up around the boomerang, the robe covering his torso, the sword clenched tight in his grip. Excruciating stabs of pain racked through his mind. He clutched his head, his hair popping out of its ponytail and cascading around his face. His body shook in waves of hurt, shuddering desperately.

and

everything

came

back.

* * *

Azula hurried breathlessly down the metal passageway, cursing her poor foresight. She should have just brought the letter for him to read while she was there.

She frowned. "SERGEANT XI?" she called loudly, her sharp voice echoing down the hall. He burst out of one of the nearby rooms.

"What is it, Princess?" he asked.

"Have you seen Sokka?" She looked up and down the hall, frowning slightly. "I thought he was down here, but I've been yelling for him and he hasn't said anything."

The sergeant shrugged slightly. "I don't know, Princess. Is it desperately urgent?"

Azula considered it for a second. Was it? No, it could wait, in hypothesis. Sokka would be back at camp for dinner – they could discuss it then. "No, not particularly," she replied slowly, and turned, making her way back up to the top of the glacier.

She read and reread the letter over and over, scratching out parts that were even the slightest bit disrespectful and nervously blotting ink onto another sheet of paper.

Soon enough the sun was setting. Azula was surprised that Sokka wasn't back yet – he was usually more than punctual. She slowly filled her bathing basin with snow, packing it tight and then melting it into steaming hot water. Wisps of steam made their way up to the top of her red tent, and she stripped off her layers and layers of armor and clothes, feeling intense relief relax her as she lowered herself into the bath.

She sang, "When La above glows, the wind whistles in the roses, and when the sky is grey with dawn, the tiger dove sings her song of sadness..."

The last time she had sang that was... well, it was ages ago – before she had stopped Sokka's torture. Azula swallowed uneasily. She didn't like thinking about that – it unsettled her. The idea of doing that again was as repulsive as the idea of torturing Ty Lee, or Mai, though the spirits only knew where they could be right now. Probably having some frolicking rendezvous with Zuko in the heart of the Earth Kingdom. Like a traitors' congregation. Maybe they had joined up with the White Lotus Society.

She let a sizzling hiss of lightning toy with her fingers, letting them wave back and forth of their own volition.

It had been a while. The sun was down. Sokka was still not back. Azula huffed, blowing her wet hair out of her eyes, and stepped out of the bath, drying herself with a quick hiss and getting dressed again.

Well, if he didn't see fit to report back to her even as a superior officer after a whole day, then she would just not consult him. Azula was fairly confident about her decision – surely her father would see her logic. She had convinced him of similarly important things before.

She rolled up the letter. Her pale fingers held up the wax, preparing to melt it onto the paper.

Suddenly, a figure burst in through the door, stumbling to the bed. It sat, its long hair hanging in front of its face.

A big, tan hand brushed his hair back. It was Sokka.

"Oh, thank the spirits! I've been looking for you all day," Azula said pointedly, taking his disheveled appearance in stride. "I want to send this to my – Sokka?"

There was an expression on his face that she hadn't seen in a while.

"Sokka, are you – are you quite alright? You seem... off."

His forehead was clutched in his hands, and as he looked up at her, she could see the undisguised hatred in his blue eyes. His mouth worked itself into a snarl, and he opened his arms. A blue robe, that strange piece of bent metal, and a sword toppled to the ground.

Azula's eyes widened in alarm as he got to his feet. "Azula," his voice said, only it wasn't quite his voice. It was a harsh snarl that set Azula on her guard. He said her name as if it were a curse.

"Sokka?" she whispered, her eyebrows set in complete shock as he lurched towards her.

"Don't... you... say... a word," he growled. "You -"

"Sokka -"

"SHUT UP!" he yelled, his face contorting into pained fury. "You, you evil bitch!" He was right up against her now, backing her into the corner, his yelling filling the tent. "I didn't know a person could be as completely soulless as you," he hissed, jabbing a finger into her chest. "You know what those are?"

Azula said nothing. Sokka pointed to the items on the ground by the bed. "ANSWER ME WHEN I ASK YOU A QUESTION!" he screamed. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT THOSE ARE?"

"No -"

"THOSE ARE THINGS FROM MY TRIBE."

Azula swallowed.

"THE SOUTHERN WATER TRIBE."

His dark eyebrows made a sharp 'v' in the center of his forehead. His face was so hideous with fury that it hardly looked like his face anymore. "Well?" he said throatily. And at that one word, Azula sat down, hard, on the chair behind her. She was so nervous she was shaking. This utter terror was something completely new, her legs jellylike. This couldn't be happening. This couldn't be real. She looked up at him, her eyes practically pleading, filled with tears. She didn't dare open her mouth for fear that those tears would spill over.

Sokka leaned down, thrusting his face into hers. "WELL?" he bellowed.

"I -" she started, and, as predicted, two fat tears slipped down her slender face.

"Oh, save your pity act for someone else," Sokka hissed. "I'm not buying it. Not anymore. Not now that I know that everything I thought could be real – everything that was real to me – it was all a big fake. All a lie."

He turned around, pacing frantically back and forth. "How could you do this to me?" he said, his voice cracking painfully. "How could you do this to anyone?"

"It's not -" Azula started, but Sokka turned, raised his left fist, and smashed it to her face.

She toppled wordlessly to the ground, and looking up at him from there was the worst view she had ever seen.

He crouched down. "Okay," he whispered. "I'm listening. Go ahead. Save yourself. Go ahead and give me any reason why I should forgive you for breaking my sister's heart, for torturing my best friends, for killing thousands of people, for smiling as you destroyed Ba Sing Se."

Azula swallowed, her amber eyes chock full of emotion. "A reason?" she whispered. "I love you."

"Don't say that!" said Sokka angrily as if she had spat poison.

"It's the reason," Azula said simply, "and it's no lie. I love you. That's all I know."

Sokka stood. "No," he said coldly. "You knew everything. The whole time. I will never forgive you."

He turned, and Azula stood up once more. There was a long silence. Azula gingerly touched the place where his fist had struck her – right below her right eye. It was tender.

"Sokka – don't – I -"

"I have to leave," he said, gathered up his things, and strode out into the cold.

Azula stood numb for a second before realizing he was going to unveil them to the Northern Water Tribe. She started yelling. "GUARDS!" she screamed, the tears streaming freely now. She burst out of the tent. It was so cold that she literally stopped still. "GUARDS! ARREST HIM!"

Before Sokka could blink, he was bound in chains. He faced her agonizingly as he was forced to his knees. Azula's eyes were riveted to him, bleeding tears one after the other. He looked away and then shut his eyes hard. The soldiers dragged him to a red tent, and Azula retreated, shaking.

She burned the long letter to her father. In its place she sent one reading, "Your orders have been received, father. Fire Nation victorious."

And then she lay in her room for two straight days, not eating, not speaking, just drinking water so there would be enough for her to cry silently.

She gave the order for Sergeant Xi to be dismissed and sent home. Then she posted a notice on the outside of the tent, outlining her plan for battle.

_Dammit, Sokka. I didn't want to do this. But now – now I can't –_

_I can't feel anything. Nothing at all._

* * *

**Relatively short chapter, I know – but I didn't want to switch to Aang, Katara and Toph after that. It didn't seem appropriate.**

**Back after the hiatus, probably lost most of my readers. ****Oh well. ****C'est la vie. I'll get the next one up as soon as I can.**

**Thanks,**

**Speechwriter**


	14. Better to Have Lived and Died

**Haha, okay, so I've just about reached my threshold for complete confusion.**

**People keep making references to grammatical errors being in my work! I'M A GRAMMAR NAZI! WHERE ARE THESE PURPORTED ERRORS?! PLEASE TELL ME! I promise I won't cut myself in dismay! I honestly can't find any, and I consider myself to be, largely, an orthographical stickler (save colloquialisms). So enlighten me.**

**That aside, enjoy the chapter. Oh, and thanks, as always, for your comments and input. They are appreciated greatly.**

* * *

It was like starting back at square one, except it was different. It was as if he had left square one, and come back only to find it had been devastated by a bomb. The same grassy patch that had used to be square one was now a dismal patch of wasted potential. Square zero. Square nothing.

So, then, he sat in his prison, that cell on the ship, stripped of all dignity, stripped of all respect. There was nothing he could do. He was shackled to the wall by one ankle, allowed five feet of pacing room, and the door was shut and locked. The walls were impenetrable – there was a small porthole a little more than halfway up the wall that showed him a little round window of day or night. He had nothing but his own clothes.

At least he had his memory. That was something, Sokka surmised. He knew who he was. He knew his place in the world. His rightful place.

Then again – when was a rightful place anything but a subjective point of view? After his born-again memory loss, hadn't his perfect place in the world been in the Fire Nation? If he had been born a Fire Nation citizen, perhaps it would always have been so.

No one had visited Sokka in the week or so since he had been locked away. He wondered if they had already laid waste to the Northern Water Tribe. He wondered if Azula was even debating over doing that anymore. Maybe the supposed debate had been an act – he couldn't know.

He sat against the wall, blowing at his hair distractedly, tapping his foot on the metal.

Suddenly the door creaked open. Surprised, Sokka looked over and saw Azula entering in a businesslike manner, her feet making the same menacing clicking noise as ever. She shut the door quietly and stood with her hands folded behind her back.

"Sokka," she said, "I need to talk to you."

He knew it was a dangerous decision, but he turned to face the wall instead. He could not look at her, and he certainly couldn't hold a conversation with her.

There was a second before she repeated herself, more quietly now. "Sokka. I – please, just turn around."

Sokka anticipated that she would get frustrated, possibly violent, next. She was actually painfully predictable in this sense.

Sure enough: "Sokka! Turn around when I'm speaking to you! Do you want me to make you?"

Less anticipated was the follow-up comment – "No. No. I can't do that to you ever again. I can't do that to anyone ever again."

Sokka thought, _Well, at least I robbed her of her ability to torture._

It was strange. When he thought of her, she no longer had a connotation. She was just another enemy face, like a soldier's mask. He couldn't feel anything besides blind hatred. He couldn't remember how he had ever loved her. In fact, he couldn't remember love.

Azula sighed. "I made a battle plan. All the soldiers seem scared. They seem reluctant. But, I mean, obviously they're terrified enough of me that they'll do whatever I say – that's not – that's not the problem here, it's just that... it's that..."

She trailed off. "Are you even listening?" she asked quietly. Sokka made no response. How could he not listen, though? He didn't think it was possible not to listen to the princess, for anyone. There was a certain sinuous quality to her voice, the honeyed way it wrapped around the ears...

"Anyway, my point is, they're waiting for my order to execute the plan, but I don't know if I can do it. I've never really done anything like this. I mean, I've been waiting all my life for any sort of power – my father had it all, my brother tasted it with his search party – but I've always been focused on myself. My self-betterment. And now I don't – I don't know what to do at all. Sokka. I don't know what to do."

Her voice cracked. Sokka heard her metal boot collide with the wall. "Sokka! You have no idea what this is like! Please!"

Then, a whisper. "...please, please, please turn around. I need your help. I have a week – maybe two – to decide."

Sokka couldn't do it. He knew she had already made up her mind, whether she realized it or not – he just didn't know which side she had decided to take. Plus, the whole scene seemed nearly mechanical, nearly rehearsed, as if she had practiced this speech a hundred times. The fluidity of her stumbles, the graceful way she tripped over the words she was saying – it indicated a practiced ease. Sokka suspected she had indeed practiced for maximum manipulation. He stared straight ahead. There was a spot of rust on the wall. He scrutinized it.

Azula left without a word. Sokka hoped that that didn't mean something bad.

* * *

"I hope you three don't mind being split up?" asked Master Piandao.

The three shot each other uneasy glances. Except Toph.

"Uh, we would... prefer if we were kept together," said Katara carefully, "but of course we will always defer to your wisdom and judgment."

The leaders of the Order of the White Lotus sat in front of them in a very intimidating horseshoe arrangement, behind tables of dark granite. They conferred among themselves for a few minutes, and Katara, Toph and Aang spoke hastily to each other while they were doing so.

"I hope they don't split us up," hissed Toph. "I might have to get them in their sleep."

"I think even you might not be able to beat them," Aang chuckled in a low voice, exchanging an amused glance with Katara. "I wonder why we would have to get split up, anyway? Both of you guys can do anything I can do."

"Except, you know, fly," Toph said sarcastically.

"And firebend," added Katara.

Aang rolled his eyes. "Point noted, but you guys, I don't want to get split up even more than we already are. Especially if some of us are going to go after Sokka – if that's what it is, then there's no way we're not all going -"

"We have reached a decision," interrupted Iroh in a resigned voice. "It is not my opinion that this should happen, but I am overruled – Aang, due to your recent injury, you shall stay here, as will Toph, because we are taking a wooden boat to go where we are going – as to blend in. Katara, however, will accompany the party, along with a large group of other White Lotus members, including myself, Master Piandao, Master Jeong Jeong, and Master Pakku. King Bumi will remain here."

Aang felt his heart sinking. How could they do this to him? He would be worried sick about Katara the whole time they were gone. It wasn't that he didn't trust the masters to take care of her – that was irrational – but after Sokka had gone, he had become nearly possessive about Toph and Katara, as if they were things that could be ripped away from him.

"Who else is going?" Katara asked quietly. In her opinion, it would be intensely awkward for her to get on a ship, resentful at having been separated from her best friends, with no one to talk to. Perhaps Haru, or Teo, or any of the Freedom Fighters were also in the headquarters at the moment and could accompany them?

"We are only taking a small party – the most powerful fighters, the strongest benders," explained Jeong Jeong. "It is vital that we pick our party wisely. There will be only ten of us: We four masters, yourself, two of Pakku's students, a student of mine, a pupil of Piandao... who am I forgetting?" He drummed his fingers, irritated, on the stone table, counting once more on his fingers. His expression cleared. "Oh, and of course – Iroh's nephew."

Katara's jaw dropped. _No no no no no no no no. NO._

Aang's grey eyes filled with fury, but he held his tongue out of respect. Toph kicked the ground in utter frustration, restraining herself from earthbending with great difficulty. "Zuko?" Katara finally blurted out in dismay.

"No!" Bumi reassured, waving a speckled old hand. "It's his other nephew, Kotaru."

"Really?" Katara asked, her eyes bright with hope.

"No," spat Jeong Jeong. "You must learn to cooperate fast. This is not a trip that can afford any compromises, Katara. It is already loss enough that we cannot bring Aang, in his weakened state."

Aang's eyebrows shot up in anger. "I'm not weak!" he said loudly. "I'm fully recovered! I've been fine for ages! Please, please let me go! I swear I'll -"

"I apologize, young Avatar," Pakku said icily, "but it is not in the best interest of the trip that you lose control of yourself. You are volatile after healing. It is a typical sign of a great injury having just been healed."

"I won't!" exploded Aang. "I'm in control! I'm absolutely fine! My injury was eight whole months ago!"

"Our decision is final," sighed Iroh. He paused, and then repeated, with more force, "Final, Aang."

Toph opened her mouth to say something extremely rude, but Iroh calmly raised a hand, and the three looked at him, at his tired, pained expression, and instantly lost the will to say anything against him. Completely drained, Toph, Katara, and Aang left the room.

"I can't believe this," Katara said weakly. "I absolutely can't believe I'm going to be stuck on a wooden boat with His Royal Angstiness without either of you to help me get by."

Toph growled, "And I can't believe I'm stuck here, doing nothing, STILL. I'm going back to the room." She stamped off, leaving shallow footprints in the stone beneath her.

Katara started to hurry after her, but Aang placed a hand on her shoulder, turning her to face him. "Katara... make sure you get some sort of messenger hawk or something before you leave, okay?" asked Aang, completely resigned. "I have to – I have to know – that, you know, that you're okay."

He looked down at her beautiful, familiar face, and couldn't believe this was happening for a split second. He hadn't left her side for any large amount of time since he had met her. They were travelers together, companions, best friends – she was everything to him.

Katara's blue eyes looked up into Aang's grey ones, which held a world of sadness far beyond his years. He was only sixteen; she was eighteen. If she had stayed in her Tribe, she would be married soon. This, though – this felt harder than anything. She was worried for him, but she was worried for herself, too – worried that without him, she would not be herself.

Katara had only really had one romantic liaison, and it had been more than disastrous. She didn't really know anything other than that remembered flutter in her stomach. This sick, swooping feeling she had now – what was it? This feeling as he simply looked at her with the utmost care, the arrow on his forehead pointing down to his gently smiling lips?

She realized that she didn't want to leave. Not now. Not ever.

But as she gently opened her mouth to say what she felt, finally, she felt Aang's light finger on her lips, shushing her slowly.

"Don't say it," Aang said. "It'll only hurt more afterwards, if you do. I know."

Katara felt her eyes well up slightly. So this feeling of need – absolute need to be with the person opposite her – Aang had suffered through this for years? How had he managed it?

But as a courtesy to him, a courtesy to the one she now knew she loved, Katara said nothing, and instead pressed her head to his chest as he folded her into an embrace.

* * *

Rumors were going around among the troops that the Fire Nation Princess was cracking. After she had visited the Water Tribe prisoner, she had spent a full ten hours sobbing hysterically in the depths of her tent, only to return to talk to him again the next day. No one dared eavesdrop on her, because when she was in this dangerous state it was not wise to even think of crossing her. No, the men all kept away from her.

Even worse, they had read the plans. They were truly monstrous – a stage of poison, a stage of confused slaughter, and then a stage of ambush to kill any remaining Tribe members. Even the most hardened veterans looked with disgust at the pages and wondered how they could do that to anyone, although they would of course carry out orders once they were given. It was on everyone's minds – how could an eighteen-year-old girl make that decision? Why had the Fire Lord given her so much responsibility? They knew that their leader was focused on the upkeep of the Earth Kingdom, but giving a spoiled Princess this sort of power was unwise. That was what they were murmuring to each other, every day, in every doubtful crevice of the camp on the glacier.

Meanwhile, the girl herself was undergoing the worst time of her life. Sokka would not speak to her, or even look at her. It had been three days. Azula had had no lack of great pains in her life, but this was by far the worst. Agonizing choices to make, with only stony silence all around – and she had no idea what to do. She could not wait much longer – she felt the suspense, the uncertainty, the distrust in the air around camp. The men did not want to look at her for fear of sudden backlash, and where she had once enjoyed their prostrate inferiority, she was now disgusted by the way she seemed to terrify them. Healthy fear, yes. Terror was unacceptable. Worse still, they were scared by what they might have to do, and there was absolutely no room for weakness in the plans she had laid – if they had to be undertaken.

Sokka himself was sorting through ideas in his head. There seemed to be absolutely no way to escape, but he was sure if he just thought hard enough he could come up with something. The walls were metal plated, a few pipes ran around the bottom edges of the room, and the only free moving things in there were his body, the chain that attached his foot to the wall, and the wooden bucket that was refilled with water every time it was emptied.

Things were just not falling into place for Sokka. There had to be some way to use what he had to get out of there. Worse was the fact that the Princess would come in every day and talk at his turned back, waiting for a reply, and sometimes he actually had to bite back words. He knew her well enough, though, and buried in her subconscious was the thing she was going to decide to do. Nothing Sokka could say or do could stop it.

He wondered about Aang and Toph, about Katara. Would they give him up as a lost cause? Would they abandon all hope that he could be rescued? He had to push those thoughts from his mind – they were too painful. That night, months ago, with the enemy in his very bed, he had called guards upon his own sister, his best friends. Why had they not yelled out the truth? He might have been able to remember everything earlier, and not be in this mess now. Why had Katara not simply screamed that she was his sister?

Sokka kicked the wall angrily. It did not yield.

* * *

The party of ten boarded the ship. There were only two girls, Katara and Master Piandao's student, who was a pretty, fifteen-year-old Earth Kingdom girl whose long hair was slung back in a long braid.

Katara was last to get onto the gangplank which led onto the low-slung boat, which had four cabins – two for three people and two for two – and two masts. Aang gripped her hand fiercely until the moment she stepped onto the small bridge between this – the world that was staying – and that – the world that would soon leave, to go Spirits-knew-where. Though Katara's eyes were bright with tears, she did not say anything. She could not.

Aang said, "Stay safe." Katara nodded.

Toph said, "Good luck, Sugar Queen," but her heart wasn't really in the childish nickname. Not now.

As Aang's eyes followed Katara up the way onto the boat, his eyes met Zuko's. Aang didn't really have the heart for a menacing glare, so the two young men just exchanged a very simple, very frank glance. Aang gave a curt nod. Zuko nodded back. Then Master Pakku and one of his students raised their hands and brought them cycling down, propelling the ship away as fast as quicksilver, out of the tiny, secret harbor under Ba Sing Se.

Katara's blue eyes were locked on Aang until he faded into the distance. Then she suddenly felt weary, so she gave a very tired sigh and walked downstairs to her room.

"Oh," she said, surprised, as she opened the door and saw Piandao's student inside. "Sorry, I didn't know you were in here."

The girl shrugged. "Well, we are the only girls, so we're sharing, I guess," she said.

"Yeah! Yeah," Katara said, trying to inject enthusiasm into her demeanor. "I'm Katara."

"I'm Szeli," replied the girl, with a courteous nod. "Pleased to make your acquaintance." She gave Katara a shy smile and lay back on her bed with a small sigh.

"Nice to meet you," said Katara. They sat in silence for a couple minutes, and then Katara asked, "Where in the Earth Kingdom are you from?"

Szeli stretched. "Ba Sing Se," she groaned. "I haven't actually been outside of the city. Or on a ship, for that matter." She let out a small, tingling laugh. "Aren't you from the Water Tribe?"

"Yeah," Katara said. "I haven't been back in a couple years."

"That must be rough," said Szeli, sitting back up slowly and starting to unpack her things. "I've been helping the Order of the White Lotus for a year now, so I haven't actually been out in the city for eight months."

"I thought you looked a little pale," laughed Katara. Szeli grinned. "Oh. Do you, um, do you know where we're going?"

Szeli shrugged. "I have no idea. Master Piandao told me to get on the boat, so I got on the boat. I thought you would know, you know, being... up there."

Katara laughed. "Up there? What do you mean?"

The other girl looked a little bashful, toying with her long braid. "Well, you're really, um, sort of famous."

Katara flushed bright red. "What? Me?"

Szeli nodded. "Yeah, all my friends know your whole little group. You guys get mentioned a lot in the ranks. Especially the Avatar. It's really cool that you taught him waterbending, by the way. You must be really great."

Katara laughed. "Well, I, I try," she stammered. "Wow. I didn't think anyone besides Aang was even considered, well, important."

Szeli looked surprised, and then shrugged, pulling an apple from her pack and crunching away. Katara toyed with the idea of her supposed anonymity actually not existing for a second, and then she thought of how wherever their group went, Aang was always hailed as a hero, and then she missed him immensely. Her half-smile faded.

Szeli must have seen it, because she asked, "You okay?"

"Yeah," covered Katara tiredly, but without much conviction. "I just – I'm leaving behind a lot."

The other girl nodded. "I understand," she said. "Is it leaving the Avatar?"

Katara's jaw dropped open. Had there been some sort of publication running about her life, that everyone knew about the personal details of –

"I saw the way he was looking at you when the ship left," Szeli continued, fiddling with her hands. "I'm sorry he couldn't go."

"Oh," Katara said, nearly relieved for a second. Szeli's frank green eyes were very observant. "Yeah, me too. And Toph."

"Is she the metalbender? I've heard stories about her," Szeli said excitedly. "Spirits, this is cool. I don't mean to be weird about this, but actually meeting one of you is really... surprising, you know?"

Katara shook her head slowly. "Not really," she murmured. She hoped, prayed that Szeli would not bring up Sokka, and her prayer was answered. The younger girl just sighed contentedly and laid back on the bed, seeming to get adjusted to the sway of the ocean. Katara didn't think she would get much peace down here after all.

* * *

Azula cracked open the seal with a shaking finger, reading it quickly, feverishly. Her golden eyes took in the words with dangerous rapidity.

_My esteemed daughter,_

_You have sent me the plan, but not confirmation by your commanding officers that they understand their terms. With inferiors such as army members, one must always make sure that he or she has covered every possible loophole. I expect you to make a presentation in five days of every detail to them, ask for their signatures, and start your outlined preemptive strike immediately afterwards. You are honored for your courage and dedication._

_Fire Nation Victorious,_

_Fire Lord Ozai_

Azula gritted her teeth, holding back her tears with difficulty. Only five days to decide whether or not she could go through with this. She had regretted sending Sergeant Xi home after the fact – he was the only officer she had felt like she could trust, and now his absence gaped.

She strode through the snow, descending quickly down the dangling rope ladder to the ship.

Her hand shoved the door open and slammed it viciously behind her. "Sokka," she said, "should I do this?"

Silence, as usual, but she had become accustomed to it, so it was as if he had replied, "I don't know, Azula – what do you feel like you should do?"

"I know it would be morally wrong, right? To kill thousands of people? But it's not just personal glory I'm concerned about. If I refused to do this, it would make my father a laughingstock. Riots would probably burst out in the places they've been threatening to do so. Maybe – I don't know, maybe a wake-up call is what the world needs. What do you think?"

More silence. Azula heard, "I have absolutely always stuck with my morals, and I think you should ask yourself whether you think your self-worth is enough for you to do the same."

She shook her head, and the small voice she was fabricating cleared. Sokka was standing, facing the wall, shirtless. On a sunny day, the metal rooms were unbelievably hot, and this particular room was right above the boiler room, so the pipes that ran along the wall would give off heat like nothing else. Azula gazed at his familiar back, the familiar sealed scars, the familiar rippled muscles of his lean torso. She stepped slowly towards him, raising a hand and pressing it to his back. It was as if a shiver ran through his body, a shiver of revulsion, and he moved away just the slightest bit so that she touched only air.

Azula swallowed, tossing back her midnight hair with composure. She was a princess. A princess. Always a princess.

She placed her hands on his shoulders, but there was no reaction of revulsion this time, just a tired sigh.

Strangely, when she turned him gently to face her, he looked her straight in the eye, and his eyes were completely blank. No hatred, no hurt. Nothing. She had never seen any expression more impossible to read than that of the Water Tribe man now – for yes, he was a man. The childish innocence which he had possessed previous to his remembrance was completely gone from that face.

She studied him. She took his face in her hands and looked him in the eyes. No flicker of emotion showed itself.

"Okay," she murmured, her golden eyes still transfixed on his tan skin, his cold blue eyes. Then, with more resolve, "Okay. Let's do this."

And she turned and clicked away, leaving Sokka to stare after her, wondering if he had made the worst mistake of his life – if, for the first time, he had misread her, and doomed his entire culture.

But today he had learned something. He had woken up late at night because of the clank of the boiler starting for the first time since they had put down anchor here, and had moved his hand a little too far to the left, burning himself on the hot metal pipe running across the side of the wall. Bit by bit, a fledgling idea made itself into the world.

The first thing to do would be to get rid of these chains.

Azula had left. She would not be back until tomorrow. He had five days.

Sokka took the chain that secured him firmly to the wall and laid it across the steaming hot pipe, sawing it frantically back and forth. It made a dreadful scraping noise that he was sure everyone would hear, but no one came inside, or even looked in the door, so he continued his work.

About half an hour later, his hands were rubbed raw from the iron links, but one of those links was mostly worn through with friction and heat. He closed his eyes, steeled himself, and yanked on the chain. The last of the link clicked open, throwing him free of the chain.

Sokka had studied mechanics quite a bit back at the palace for want of anything else to do. These pipes looked to be pretty standard, with exhaust valves at the end that were turned to open so that the boiler's heat could spill into the open air outside, or into other rooms, instead of melting the pipes outright. Sokka, however, had spent years in the presence of a master airbender, and he knew the power of air in great force.

He examined the spot on the pipe he had used to break his chain. The rust was worn down to a dull silver shine. There was probably a little less than a centimeter of metal left.

Checking the door and the porthole, he could get a vague idea of where on the ship he was. Right below was the boiler room, right above was probably a large amount of cargo and small mission boats – canoes, to blend in with the Water Tribe – and out in the hallway there was a way directly out to the aft of the ship. Sokka's plan was to make a hole in the ceiling using hot air. He didn't know if it was feasible, but the exhaust coming up from the boiler room had to be a few hundred degrees at least, and the thin sheet metal in-between the struts of the ceiling wouldn't be hard to melt – or at least make malleable.

So he sealed off one direction of the exhaust using the tiny tap on the side so that it was only being pumped one way – out of the ship. Then he started to saw at the shiny part of the pipe with his broken chain.

Once a fair amount of silvery shavings had been dropped to the floor, Sokka sealed off the exhaust pipe's way out of the ship, scared of how fast the pressure might build up. How many gallons of air were being pumped into the pipe per minute? How many could it withstand? If the seals broke, his plan was shot permanently.

With that thought in mind, he sawed harder, and it was only a few minutes before he could feel the groove in the pipe coming to an end – a harder metal coated the inside, one that was presumably more resistant to heat.

A few choice sawing movements. A tiny hole appeared in the pipe.

It was like an explosion of hot air. Sokka felt searing heat hit him in a massive wave as the built-up air burst from the tiny aperture, slamming into the ceiling in a steaming jet.

He didn't anticipate having to wait long for the ceiling to heat up. He was right.

The sheet metal slowly started to glow an ominous dark reddish color. Sokka hopped over to the other side of the pipe, careful to avoid the hot air, and released the seal on the exhaust so that the flow of hot air upwards faded to nothing. There were support struts running up the side of the wall, and he stood in-between two of them, climbing up towards the ceiling, bracing himself between them.

He was about four feet from the ceiling. Reaching out with a fistful of chain, he sunk his hand into the metal, feeling the chain break its hot surface. Sokka's heart thudded with excitement as he roughly gouged out a large hole in the ceiling. The metal circle he had cut out fell with a vibrating clatter onto the floor, and Sokka reached out a hand to grab the edge of his way out –

He stifled a yell of pain. The ceiling was hot.

It was nearly cruel, having to wait for the metal to cool when his escape route was right there, but he did it anyway – he waited a full half-hour.

Then he hoisted himself into the hole and was out of sight.

There was a dark crawl space in-between the ceiling of belowdecks and the floor of the deck above, nearly too small for Sokka to crawl. Instead, he wriggled on his stomach, heading for the nearest pool of light – the light shining through a grate. These grates could be popped open from above and the crawl space was generally used for storage of various cargo, but he would be escaping through one instead. He just had to wait until all the footsteps above him vanished, and all the men returned to camp on top of the glacier for the night.

It was a long wait, made longer by the steaming heat in the dark. Every so often he would sneak a breath of cold air from outside. The two extremes made his body uncomfortably sweaty and dirty.

Then, at last, night fell, and Sokka reached up a hand and popped the grate, slithering out, closing the criss-crossed bars behind him. He looked around, took one of the light wooden canoes that sat nearby, and lowered it into the water, which was about ten feet below the edge of the deck.

He didn't want to hit that water in his state. It was absolutely freezing out in the open air, and the water, he knew, would be like an icy hand, stopping the heart momentarily.

So he took a length of chain, secured it to a ring on the side of the boat, and shimmied down, ignoring the clanking noise it made against the side of the metal ship. He was in a canoe. He was free. He knew who he was.

Sokka of the Water Tribe drew in a deep breath through his nose, feeling invigorated, feeling alive for the first time in a long time. More than that – he was right on the doorstep of home.

Grabbing the paddles that were stowed beneath the front seat, he deftly and silently navigated himself around the side of the glacier towards the very front door of the Northern Water Tribe.

* * *

**Apologies for the long wait. I'm pretty sure this story doesn't have far to go before wrapping up – several more chapters, probably. Maybe twenty total, maximum. More likely seventeen, eighteen. Around there. Anyway – the end is in sight, so you no longer have to worry about my terribly unreliable and largely nonexistent update schedule! Sorry again for that.**

**I did try to improve the quality of this chapter – several people have expressed disappointment in the quality of the writing, for which I'm very sorry. I wanted to make it up to you. I hope I (at least partially) have done so with this chapter, which is sort of longer than the last few and hopefully better.**

**Thanks, and drop me a review if you'd like,**

**Speechwriter.**


	15. Split

**Once again, apologies for the deplorably slow updates. Exams are kickin' my butt. This chapter is pretty freakin' long, though, because I originally thought this was going to be two chapters, but they wouldn't have been very satisfying individually, so I glued them together. It's about equal parts action and introspection, perhaps but hopefully not verging on repetitive? I'd like to hear some thoughts on the flow of this story – I know it's weak at a lot of points, and I'm considering going back and editing this story into a more presentable shape after it's finished. Which should be in two, maybe three chapters.**

**As always, I love to hear your feedback. Drop me a review.**

**Thanks ever so,**

**Speechwriter.**

* * *

"Katara! MOVE!" yelled Master Piandao, skidding across the slippery deck, his dark sword clenched in his strong hand. Katara whirled around as the ship rocked dangerously, her torso smacking hard into the wooden side rail. Her breath was taken out of her with a 'thump' and she threw up violently into the ocean. She muttered a few choice words, turning to face the enemy, her eyes slits of rage.

The serpent reared up, its bright tongue lolling from its mouth, its eyes rolling madly. Katara felt sick looking at it. "HEY! LOOK DOWN HERE!" she screamed, wildly waving her hand. It let out a huge hissing noise and directed its gaze to the Water Tribe girl.

"That's right," she murmured to herself, and lifted her hands high. Szeli returned from belowdecks with Master Pakku and his students just in time for them all to see a wave the size of a small mountain rise up from the water over the serpent's head. Katara gritted her teeth in concentration, clenching her eyes shut as she closed her fists tight, freezing the huge mass of water.

Bit by bit, the torrent of dark blue water turned to light ice. As the last bit froze, Katara gasped for air and sat down hard, sweating and feeling extremely drained. The back half of the serpent thrashed wildly, battering at the ice encasing its head, but its scales slid off the slick surface. Finally, the beast shook its head madly, driven crazy by lack of air, and smashed the great block of ice right into the Serpent's Pass. The sliver of rock which was the pass miraculously held, instead making a huge fissure down the edge of the ice, and when the serpent opened its great jaws, the ice split into two huge pieces which floated around in disarray. The serpent gave the ship one last long look and slunk back down into the water. They could see it swimming away into the distance, its bright scales dulled by the blueness of the sea.

"Wow," Szeli said breathlessly. Pakku gave a wry smile.

"Excellent work, Katara," he commented. "Just in time for lunch. Let's go below and have some stew."

Katara shook her head. "I'll be down in a moment," she said, although it wasn't true at all. Katara didn't feel much like associating with anyone on the ship. Szeli's apparent awe of Katara always made her intensely uncomfortable, and she still felt great amounts of resentment against the masters, Pakku, Piandao, Jeong Jeong, and Iroh, who were present. Pakku's two students detested Katara and had no need to befriend her, as they were two best friends that she had bested in mock combat at the Northern Water Tribe many times. Jeong Jeong's pupil and Szeli seemed to get along well, so they were together a lot of the time, which of course left Zuko, and Katara didn't even want to think about that.

She would not even consider trying to reconnect with Zuko until after she was completely sure that Sokka was okay – and even then it would be a tough call. The closest bond she was considering now was that of a temporary alliance, and that would drop instantly if she even got the slightest wind that Sokka was dead.

Of course, Katara didn't believe that was true. Surely if her brother had died, she would have felt something, would have felt part of her die, would have sensed some sort of change in the dynamic of her existence. No, he was still in Azula's godforsaken clutches, alive, or perhaps had managed to escape, though his brainwashing had seemed extensive. Maybe it was the same type of mind control the Dai Li had used on Jet...

Katara leaned over the side of the ship and took in a deep breath, looking down at the comforting water below her. She still didn't even know where they were going – the masters had kept it under very close wraps; none of the other people on the ship knew where the course was set either. Katara had a private hunch that they were headed for the Fire Nation, and she had a secret agenda – to rescue her brother at all costs, regardless of the actual mission.

* * *

Sokka was terrified to yell up at the entrance to the Northern Water Tribe. What if the firebenders heard him and brought him back to the ship? He had to find some way to get word to them before Azula carried out the first step of her plan. He had slept under the rough horse blanket in the canoe, which he had tied to an ice floe right off the edge of the main glacier, where seals barked at him annoyingly.

When he awoke, it was blindingly bright, and he remembered that he had escaped. A rush of energy made him sit bolt upright. Spirits – he had four days to find a way into the practically-impenetrable Northern Water Tribe. How? He had no weaponry, no bending, no signals, and worst, no food. The closest thing he had to a weapon was his paddle, and that was honestly useless. He couldn't climb the glacier using a wooden paddle – it had taken a team of trained, armed firebenders a full day to hack their way to the top.

His best bet was probably to lie low and wait for a team of waterbenders to emerge to go on a fishing trip, as they did every two days – though two days was a long time without food.

Of course, Sokka supposed, he had starved once before. And all it had cost him was his memory.

* * *

Aang and Toph stared at the ceiling dejectedly.

"Man, I never thought I could miss Sugar Queen so much," Toph huffed, blowing her hair out of her eyes. "She's usually such a downer."

Aang laughed. "You know you love her."

Toph scowled. "Yeah, you too, Twinkletoes."

There was a brief pause, and then she barreled on. "You know who I've really been missing lately? Snoozles."

Aang felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach. His wide grey eyes scrutinized the stone ceiling. "Oh, man, I forgot you used to call him that," Aang murmured. "I miss him too."

Toph sighed. "Can I tell you something?" she asked sleepily. Aang's breathing hitched. Toph's voice was supremely serious, something she very rarely let happen. Usually the girl was all bombast, all showy strength. It was only on occasion that she would let her guard down.

"Yeah," Aang said.

"I think I was in love with him," Toph said simply, as if commenting on the weather.

Aang swallowed. He had surmised something of the sort. "Yeah?" he said.

"Now that he's gone, I don't really know what to do with myself," the blind girl continued, picking idly at her bedsheets. "That's why I'm such a stupid crybaby about being trapped in here. At least when I'm out there kicking butt and taking names I can forget about him for a split second."

Aang nodded. "I know what you mean," he said. "It's like that with Katara. Every second she's gone, I'm just completely on edge. Just sitting here, just being here, is just – it's totally awful." He groaned and flipped over. Toph grinned at him.

"We're pretty alike, Twinkletoes," she said.

"That's why we stick together," he laughed, and reached over to punch her lightly on her left shoulder.

She yawned and rolled off the bed. "I'm going to go get some food, or something. Want to come?" Toph asked.

"Nah, I'll pass," Aang said. "I think I'll take a nap."

But he didn't nap. The entire three hours Toph was gone, Aang just thought about the two Water Tribe siblings. He couldn't imagine a world without either of them. It was like imagining a world without the Water Tribe itself – completely out of balance to him. Wrong. Sick.

Katara could hold her own. Sokka could, too, although Aang was more worried about the latter. With this odd spell Azula had put him under, would she put him on one of her Fire Navy ships or something, send him off as a Fire Navy soldier? And if he happened to meet Katara in his brainwashed state, might he not just kill his own sister without a thought to the contrary?

And that thought made Aang so damn scared he just didn't know what to do.

* * *

Sokka hid behind the chunk of ice, waiting for the seal to flip the fish out of the water.

He heard the soft splash, then the splat of the fish's scaly hide on the ice. Immediately, Sokka sprang from behind the ice and made himself as big as possible. The seal barked in alarm and fled, and Sokka grabbed up the fish triumphantly. It was nice and plump, perfect for his lunch. He hadn't eaten in twenty-eight hours, and was feeling moderately lightheaded.

Cooking the fish over a fire he had started by rubbing two broken pieces of wood on each other, Sokka eyed the calm ocean's waters tentatively. Surely the Water Tribe would be sending someone out soon, someone to fish, someone to hunt for food... There was no way he could miss that colossal door opening.

As he wolfed down his meal ravenously, Sokka's blue eyes widened in surprise, although he had been suspecting it. A semicircle of ice was slowly descending right under the magnificent Water Tribe symbol, and a few canoes were paddling out into the water.

Sokka leapt to his feet, grabbing his paddle and waving it around frantically. "HEY!" he screamed. "HEY! OVER HERE!"

He yelled as loudly as he could, and for a heartstopping few minutes he thought that none of them had heard, that his one chance was ruined.

But then one canoe shifted its course slightly and headed for him, and Sokka's eyes teared up in the icy air as he awaited its arrival at his ice floe.

* * *

Katara frowned, poring over her maps. She hadn't yet decided what the best course of action was to regain Sokka – everyone on the ship was being so petulant about the trip in general that she spent most of her time on the stern of the ship, alone, studying the maps of the Fire Nation that she had brought with her.

If they were going to storm the royal palace, they would have brought a larger contingency of fighters, she mused. No, it was probably something to do with intelligence, or surveillance.

Why had King Bumi not come along? He was the head of operations in Ba Sing Se, certainly, but there had to be some reason that they couldn't have just relegated his duties temporarily to someone just as able, and surely someone slightly more mentally sound –

"Hello there," a voice said. Katara recognized the scratchy tone instantly and made no move to acknowledge his words or presence. She flipped a page.

"Why are you looking at maps of the Fire Nation?" Zuko asked, crouching down next to her. She subconsciously flinched away and didn't answer.

Katara steamed inside. Who did he think he was, just coming up to her, interrupting what she was doing? Why did he think he could just speak to her? Was it because they were on the same boat? Because Katara had been on boats with plenty of people she had despised in the past, and this was no exception.

"Look, if you need to know something about the Fire Nation, I'm pretty much your guy," Zuko said reasonably, sitting down with a grunt.

"Do you know what we're doing here?" Katara blurted suddenly, looking up at Zuko.

He frowned, taken aback. "Wh-what?"

"Where are we going? Why could Aang and Toph not come? Why are there no Earthbenders? Why won't the Masters tell us? Why are there only ten of us? If we're going to the Fire Nation, why aren't they adequately preparing us?"

Zuko hadn't even considered half those questions on his own time, and immediately felt foolish for not doing so. He didn't know any of the answers, either. "I ... I don't know," he said.

"Are you sure?" Katara asked skeptically. "You're pretty close to your uncle."

He sighed. "No. He won't tell me anything about the plans of the Order of the White Lotus. I'm just another member when it comes to the group."

Katara looked at Zuko, at the massive scar marring his left eye, at the perturbed look in his golden eyes, and felt a wave of disgust wash over her. She kept her patronizing, judgmental thoughts to herself, trying to flush them away with thoughts of Aang. Then, against her will, she spat, "Don't think you can just... talk to me."

Zuko looked a little taken aback. "What do you -"

"Don't think," Katara growled, "that just because for some reason they saw fit to stick us on the same godforsaken canoe, that you're entitled to speak to me. I don't want to talk to you. Not after what you've done."

Zuko swallowed, his heart beating miserably in his throat. He had hoped she would put it aside for the sake of the mission – but she was right, as usual. They didn't even know what the mission was, either. "I'm sorry, Katara," he said. "That's all I can say to you."

Then he stood up and left, and Katara didn't feel remorseful at all, but flipped back to the map of the world and thought very hard about what she had just said.

She called the boat a godforsaken canoe. Canoes – many waterbenders – no earthbenders. Could it be that they weren't going to the Fire Nation after all? But why, for Spirits' sake, would they be going to the Northern Water Tribe?

* * *

"I DON'T CARE WHAT IT TAKES, FIND HIM!" shrieked Azula, her golden eyes the wildest they had been for months and months.

"Yes, Princess, the search party is mounting as we speak," said the General in a low voice, keeping his eyes trained on Azula's red shoes.

"IT BETTER DAMN WELL BE!" she yelled, and in a fit of rage she turned and shot a bolt of blue fire from her fingertips. It flew directly through the red tent wall as if it had hit nothing at all, leaving a tiny black hole in its wake. "Get out," Azula muttered. "Get out, both of you."

The General and his Captain left immediately, terrified by her mood. They had not seen her this enraged since her father had first denied her the attack on the Water Tribe.

Azula flung herself onto her bed, her lips curling downwards in an ugly, angry frown. This ruined everything. How the hell had he escaped? How had she been so stupid as to leave the tiniest thing to chance? Surely as they spoke he was entering the Water Tribe, preparing to tell whomever was in charge that the Fire Lord's daughter was camping out directly above their home. Sokka. Loyal Sokka, driven Sokka. She never should have left anything to chance.

* * *

Indeed, as Azula was having the hugest hissy fit of her career, Sokka was on a boat into the Water Tribe. However, nothing was going as swimmingly as planned.

"You have to listen to me," he urged. "Princess Azula of the Fire Nation is a little less than a mile from here. She has a camp of about a hundred firebenders."

The man heading the boat turned around and gave Sokka a skeptical glance. "Keep quiet," he said. "We don't even know who you are."

Sokka looked down at himself. He was only wearing the short black pants of the Fire Nation, and a horse blanket. Of course they had no way to identify him.

He knew Chief Arnook, though. Once he could go see Chief Arnook, the truth would be out, and Azula would have to leave, or be captured.

"I have to see Chief Arnook," he blurted out loudly. There was silence from the waterbenders around him. "Come on, you guys! It's Sokka! From the Southern Water Tribe. Can't you – I mean, I guess you can't recognize me. Seriously? Hello? Anyone?"

He fumed. They were all ignoring him. They didn't realize the enormity of their situation. The entire Water Tribe could be wiped out by poison, by fire, any day now, and they just sat there, staring mutely ahead as if he weren't saying anything at all.

When they docked, it was some insignificant corner of ice, by no means near to the palace. In fact, it was about as far from the palace as possible, right up against the wall of the glacier, right next to a large grate which was probably some sort of unnecessary storm drain.

"Doesn't anyone live here?" Sokka asked. He couldn't remember there being many empty houses on the upper tiers of the city, closer to where he, Katara, Aang and Toph had used to stay.

One of the boatsmen shook his head. "No," he said, "most of these houses are still empty because of people lost during Fire Nation raids. Refugees just live here temporarily. It's safer closer to the palace."

"We shall ask someone to ask Chief Arnook to see you tomorrow," interrupted the head of the boat. "What did you say your name was?"

Sokka sighed. "Sokka," he repeated to the young, tanned man. He was probably a couple years younger than Sokka. He probably had never seen the horrors of war, had probably never really been hurt at all. He was innocent. He could not be murdered by Azula's horrific plan. Yet, somehow, Sokka would have to wait for tomorrow for an audience with Arnook.

"Because we don't know if we can trust you yet," said a gruff old waterbender, "we'll be assigning you a couple of guards to make sure you stay inside. If you leave before we find out who you are, we will not hesitate to attack you. Got it?"

Sokka could see that arguing with him wouldn't help his case at all. "Yup," he said emotionlessly, walking into the small snowy room with a repressed sigh itching to be let from his lungs.

They would all be forsaken if he couldn't tell Arnook in time. What if Azula managed to speed up the delivery of the poisons, and could start a few days in advance? What if they were all to die tomorrow from the water they loved so much?

There wasn't a thing Sokka could do. It was nearing evening. One of the guards brought him a plate of dinner.

_From one prison to another,_ he thought wryly.

* * *

Katara's suspicions were confirmed. Once they were out of the inner waterways of the Earth Kingdom, the boat had turned and started to head north. Why would they go to the Northern Water Tribe? Did they need to recruit waterbenders for some larger mission? That must be why all the secrecy was shrouding their mission – Katara knew that she wouldn't have made such a huge deal out of just hopping up to the Water Tribe otherwise.

Zuko, thank the Spirits, hadn't tried to converse with her again, which had given Katara some time to cool off from her last minor fit. She was irritated that, after having gone to all the trouble of bringing the Fire Nation maps and information, they were headed to the Northern Water Tribe. She knew about every little passage, every small waterway in the Water Tribe. She knew about the tunnel that connected the palace to a tiny, inconspicuous hut on the second level, knew about the passage leading from the top of the glacier right into the city. She couldn't have possibly brought anything of use, and was now burdened with all this useless information.

Katara sighed and brushed back a loop of hair. Szeli seemed to have been scared away by Katara's temporarily irritated attitude, and so Katara had absolutely no one to talk to. She and Aang had written a few letters, but they were far away enough from Ba Sing Se now that Hawky took several days to carry their notes back and forth. So as not to exhaust the bird, Katara had written to Aang not to respond in her last letter. That had been a hard one to write.

The further the boat drifted, the emptier Katara seemed to feel. She was stranded between the Northern Water Tribe and Ba Sing Se, and although she was going towards the place she used to call home, she felt as if she should have stayed behind. The thought of something happening to Aang and Toph sickened her.

She slumped over on her bed, screaming frustratedly into her mattress, her dark brown hair sprawling across the sheets in a dark web. She had never used to be this worrisome, this cowardly. It wasn't until Sokka was taken that true paranoia had really kicked in.

And that was the worst of it. If they were going to the Northern Water Tribe, she had no time and no way to sneak away and find her brother.

* * *

Azula stormed from her tent, her regal black hair bound up by the arrogantly glinting Fire Nation insignia. She could not be around these men right now.

She walked for about a mile into the barren tundra, then found a rocky overhang of a cave and started a fire. Sitting against the wall, she thought hard.

If Sokka was going to alert the Water Tribe to her presence, she had two immediately apparent options:

First, she could start the attack right then and there.

Second, she could retreat, admitting temporary defeat, to return another day.

Furious, she kicked a stone. She should never have had to make this choice. She should never have even considered being disloyal to her country. And who had planted those seeds of doubt? Sokka had. If she had never met him – if she had never been intrigued by him, back in those dungeons, if she had never fallen for him...

Azula clenched her golden eyes shut, struggling to keep the ugly expression off her face. She had to look emotionless, even if her broken heart was waging a well-fought war against that goal. Sokka's sea-blue eyes as they stared into hers, somehow knowing what she felt, knowing better than anyone had ever known. His willingness to break past all the barriers she had spent so many years constructing. His comfort over her angry past. His rational, intelligent advice. His stupid jokes. His constant hunger. The rough feeling of his lips pressing against hers...

All this had distracted from the one thing she cared about more than anything: her country.

She recalled, though, the words that Zuko had spoken to her in a fit of rage one day – that he had traveled all over the world, and the Fire Nation was hated. Loathed. Feared. Not loved, not appreciated.

Those sentiments reminded Azula of those that people felt for the Princess herself. She swallowed. She was the Princess of Fire. She had no weaknesses; she didn't care what others thought about her; she served the Fire Nation...

But once she had started caring, she hadn't been able to stop. A whole world of emotions, unlocked by a few simple, stupid, gentle expressions of kindness. And now she couldn't bring herself to think of who she might be murdering in there, in the Northern Water Tribe.

What would Sokka say?

_You have to do what your heart tells you is right._ That's what he'd say. That's what he had always encouraged her to do, which was something in itself – he truly believed she had a heart. But now – there was no way. Now he didn't. And more than Azula had ever hated anything before, she hated herself. The only things that mattered, that she cared about preserving, were her honor, her country, her soldiers, and just maybe every single person from the Northern Water Tribe.

Azula swallowed, staring at the warm flames, and a third option flowed into her mind like quicksilver, and this option promised that she could save all that. She wondered why she hadn't thought of it before.

* * *

Sokka woke with a start. Someone had walked into his room.

The young man who had been heading the boat yesterday said, "Chief Arnook says he knows you, and he'd like to see you soon, but he has a vital meeting with his waterbending masters that cannot be postponed."

Sokka slid out of bed and nodded gravely. He asked, "Did anyone tell him what I told you? About the firebenders?"

The man looked confused. "What? We didn't think to," he said. "By the way, you're free to walk around, if you need to. Now that we know who you are." He exited the small room.

Sokka stared after him in disbelief. They didn't _think_ to? They didn't_ think_ to tell Chief Arnook that in a very prompt, timely manner, they could all be completely annihilated by ruthless Fire Nation plots? Sokka laughed out loud coldly and sat back on his bed, massaging his forehead. His furious blue eyes practically melted holes into the icy walls opposite him, and he let out a breath.

His gaze fell on the familiar clothes and parka that lay next to him on the bed. He sighed and buried his face into them, breathing in. They smelled so familiar, yet so far away, as if he weren't really there at all, was just losing himself in past reminiscence of what his home had been like. Like ash, like musk, like the sea.

He threw on the clothes, blocking the cold air from his body, and felt unbelievably pampered. He was back where he belonged. He was home. He could even go and visit his grandmother. It was surreal – having a choice of what he wanted to do. The last time he had been allowed to do absolutely anything was before his memory had returned, way back in the Fire Nation, where he had been practically brainwashed.

Yet he had been happy, too. And Azula had been...

Sokka hadn't even let himself think about her, but now that he did, he found it strange. The overbearing hatred was a thick layer on top of everything else, but once he sifted through that layer, he found that he wondered why she had been... kind to him. Aang, Katara and Toph had escaped, so she couldn't have used him as leverage against them anymore afterwards – why had she continued to let him do whatever he chose, forming bonds with him, laughing with him, letting him get a glimpse of who she really was? Wasn't that the worst choice she could have made – revealing the vulnerable side of herself? Had she really been so secure in the fact that his memory would be lost forever?

Stranger was this thought: if they had been born on the same side, they might have always been together that way. There was a natural magnetism between their personalities, between his cool sarcasm and her icy contempt, between his goofy alter ego and her unwilling desire to laugh at his antics. As much as Sokka hated to admit it – as much as he wished it weren't true – they were a perfect match.

If she weren't such a lying, torturing, murdering, two-faced Fire Nation Princess, that was.

* * *

Azula sighed and kicked out the fire. Her boot collided with a sizable stone and she cursed loudly, watching the stone in question roll towards the back of the cave. She had made her decision. She would go through with it. There was just one thing she needed to know.

Her eyes followed the stone absentmindedly, but Azula frowned as it suddenly dropped out of sight.

Blinking, she walked all the way to the back of the cave. There was a three-foot-wide hole in the bottom of the thin stone, a smooth hole that continued to burrow down through the ice below.

Azula frowned and peered into the gap. The ice on the circular hole's walls was completely smooth. This had been created by Waterbenders. And even more weirdly convenient were the rungs that were sticking out of the side of the tunnel.

Looking around suspiciously, Azula lowered herself into the tunnel. If it ended abruptly, she could just climb back out, after all...

She stepped downwards for what felt like an age, and then suddenly where she put her foot there was no rung. She slipped, dangling by both hands from a rung, and looked down, eyes wide and fearful.

Azula laughed. The tunnel turned horizontal right below her. She stepped down regally onto the ice, looking up above her. That would be terrible to climb back up...

She continued down the tunnel, relieved that it didn't split, make her choose where to go.

The blue ice around her made her very on edge. She didn't like being surrounded by her opposite – she felt suffocated and uneasy, as if the tunnel would somehow collapse onto her at any second.

After about twenty minutes of brisk and careful walking – she didn't want to slip on the rock-hard ice – Azula saw, at the end of the twisting tunnel, a metal grate. Her stomach dropped. Really? She was going to be denied getting out of this tunnel by one locked grate?

As she came up on it, though, she saw that there was a small latch on the side. She flicked it open lightly, her heart beating quickly. The iron swung open with a slow creak, and Azula emerged into the Northern Water Tribe.

She cursed. She was in a small back street. No one was there just then, but there was no way she could pass for a Water Tribe dweller if someone happened to see her.

Carefully shutting the grate, making sure it stayed unlocked, she peered into a nearby house, wrinkling her nose at the fact that this Tribe lived in little more than huts made out of snow. She dashed inside, seeing that it was empty.

The first thing she did was remove her Fire Nation insignia, letting her hair tumble down from its topknot. She arranged it into a mildly presentable position, then removed her red cape. Underneath that she had rich fur-lined armor, which was also a regrettable shade of crimson. In fact, everything she had on was either red or black, neither of which the Water Tribe wore on a day to day basis. She stripped everything off, feeling the cold air attack her violently.

Azula cursed quietly and snuck into one of two back rooms of the house. It seemed empty except for a few stray clothes of varying shapes and sizes – some baggy blue pants, which were incredibly warm, and then a blue parka with a furry white neckline on top. She was warm again. She sighed contentedly and looked in the mirror on the wall.

Something behind her golden eyes unsettled her. The fire that was usually there was deadened, servile.

Azula studied her face carefully, the slight downturn of her full lips, the regal arch of her eyebrows, the impassive stare of her eyes she had mastered for so long. Then she turned away, unable to look much longer. She disgusted herself. It didn't matter, though. She wouldn't have to look at her own repulsive face much in the future, if all went according to plan.

Now – to find Sokka. Azula tucked her gold insignia into her pocket and strolled outside, acting casual.

* * *

Katara sighed. It had been three days, and every waterbender on board had been bending the water around the boat as quickly as they could in an attempt to speed up the journey. They had started seeing drifting ice floes the day before. Katara anticipated arrival at the Northern Water Tribe very soon.

She didn't know why the change in pace was necessary. They would have arrived in about a week, anyway. What she did know was that the continued messenger birds flying in and out of the masters' rooms made her itch with curiosity. Perhaps one of those birds bore news that meant they had to be at the Water Tribe faster. What could the news be?

It was like slavery, Katara mused as she leaned back and pushed forward, feeling the weight of the water in her arms. She got up at seven, waterbended for five hours, had lunch, and then waterbended until nine at night, which was when they had dinner, with only a couple breaks of a few minutes each in-between. Each of the other waterbenders, save Pakku, was equally disgruntled. Katara, at least, had the sense to keep her mouth shut about it, because she knew that Pakku ended up lecturing sternly every person he ever heard whining. Besides, the faster they got to the Northern Water Tribe, the faster she could demand some answers.

A tired cheer rose from the other side of the boat. Katara perked up and looked over. Pakku was waving his arms slowly, an uncharacteristic grin on his face. "MASTER PAKKU HERE!" he yelled, and as Katara came around to the other side, she could see a canoe – one with the symbol of the Water Tribe on it. A fishing expedition. She would be home soon... so very soon.

Katara hadn't realized how much she missed being in the Water Tribe. The soft crunch of the snow flattening under her feet, the glare of the sun, the blue sky, the occasional, beautiful snowfall. Suddenly she wanted to be back behind that huge, white wall, to see Chief Arnook, to see her grandmother. She wanted to be a part of the Tribe again.

* * *

Sokka stood and stretched his legs. His grandmother needed visiting – it had been more than a year since he had last seen her, and Spirits, he had so much to tell her.

He tugged on his shoes and walked outside, squinting in the harsh sun. He took his mittens away from his eyes, and his gaze went to the only other person in sight, across the waterway.

It was as if someone had splashed icy water all over his face. He couldn't breathe for a second, and his next instinct was to hide. Then he wanted to yell as loudly as possible for help, but his lips seemed frozen shut.

Not even ten feet from him, on the other side of the small canal, stood Princess Azula, clad in a blue parka and dark blue pants, her hair down, her golden eyes glinting in the wintry sunlight.

Sokka didn't know what to do. He just stood there, rooted to the spot, swaying slightly as if hit with a large weight.

Azula's eyes had found him. "Sokka?" she said in a soft voice. Sokka opened his mouth to yell for help, but she had leapt six feet across the canal before he could say a word, slamming a hand to his mouth and forcing him down to the icy ground.

He felt pure, unadulterated fear. Making muffled screams against her soft mittens, he kicked desperately, trying to get away, until she jabbed a spot in his neck and he went limp. Ty Lee's influence was obvious.

She dragged him inside and to the back room, then shut the door. Her deceptively small frame heaved Sokka's six-foot frame up onto the bed.

He lay there. Only his eyes could move, frantically scanning the room, eventually fixing upon Azula with a harsh stare. She sat at the end of the bed, her hand little more than a foot from his leg.

She tugged off her mittens and Sokka's heart sprang into a sprint. Spirits, what was she going to do? Was she going to kill him right then and there? After he had reached safety? After he had reached home?

He was never safe from her.

* * *

**So, yup, nice long chapter for you guys. Please drop me a line or eight and give me advice, suggestions, thoughts, feedback. It's greatly appreciated.**

**Oh, just so you know –**

**This story has 94 reviews, 47 favorites, and 56 alerts. That's AWESOME! Thanks so much for making it happen.**

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**Much love,**

**Speechwriter**


	16. And Although

**As soon as I hit a hundred reviews I went into turbo-writing mode! Thus, a crazy-long chapter in LESS THAN A WEEK. Boo-yah.**

**We'll be wrapping up with the next chapter. It's been real. Thanks as always for your feedback and thoughts!**

**Speechwriter**

* * *

His blue eyes were locked onto her golden ones. She merely looked at his face for a few minutes. Sokka could feel his body slowly starting to respond to his desperate thoughts, starting with his facial features.

Azula started speaking.

"Sokka, I'm not here for any sort of deceptive reason. I just want you to know that I -"

Her eyes closed and she turned away before she continued.

"I'm so sorry. I'm sorry for everything that I've done. I'm sorry for hurting you. I'm sorry for lying to you. I'm sorry for being selfish enough to keep you to myself when you didn't even know who you were, and I'm sorry for the people you love that I've hurt."

It came out in a low, emotional rush. Sokka found he could move his mouth slightly, and he slurred,

"So, what, you going to kill me now?"

Azula looked over at him. She didn't think he understood. It was quite obvious that he thought she was being insincere.

"No. This isn't just for show," she said, "and it's not just to leave a good taste in your mouth before I kill you, no. I just wanted you to know that."

"Why are you here?" Sokka mumbled.

Azula got off the bed and pulled a chair up to the side of the bed so that she could look at his face more easily, which made Sokka intensely uncomfortable. "I'm here so that you can capture me," she said.

Sokka spluttered messily in laughter. "What?"

"You're going to turn me in to the Chief of the Water Tribe, and I'm going to be able to keep my honor, I'm not going to hurt my soldiers, I'm not going to hurt any of your people, my country won't remember me as a traitor, and -" She broke off and slowly looked directly into his eyes. "I'll never hurt you again."

Sokka was intensely disturbed. He looked into her eyes and found no malice, just dreary self-deprecation.

"Why?" he whispered softly, unable to stop himself.

"Well," Azula said, her regal voice soft, "I'm only eighteen and I've done things no one should ever do in their lifetime. I don't deserve to be here, so I'll leave the world to its own devices and get locked up for what I've done. I think that's fair."

The Water Tribe boy's eyes flickered back up to the ceiling. Azula never did really have any sort of reasonable judgment as to what was fair and what wasn't. But was all this for show?

"If you're being honest... if this is really what you're doing," he said, "then go to the front room. There should be some rope there, from that canoe I stole. Bring it back into this room."

Azula shocked him by doing exactly that.

Sokka sat up weakly, his head slipping to one side helplessly. Azula swallowed. She was struck, suddenly and violently, by how handsome he was. The blue of his parka seemed to make his blue eyes glow like chips of ice in his tanned face, his masculine features serious, his dark hair and eyebrows nearly black in the half-light. A perfect man, physically and mentally, one she never should have hurt.

He opened his mouth. "You're going to wait here until I can move again. Then I'm going to tie you to that chair and go and get help. If you're being honest, you won't leave."

She didn't.

Azula sighed. Could he really not understand? She was doing this for him. She was doing this because of him.

Sokka said, "In that case, you'll be honest when I ask you these questions."

Azula rolled her eyes. "Yes, of course, go ahead," she said drily.

"Was it real?" he blurted.

"Was what real?"

Sokka stared at her intensely. "When you said you loved me, were you telling the truth?"

Azula closed her eyes and swallowed. How could she make him believe her? "They were the truest words I've ever spoken," she answered softly.

Spirits. Sokka felt himself descend into a moral conundrum. The Princess of the Fire Nation was just offering herself up as a prisoner of war. As he actually conversed with her for the first time since he had exploded at her for her lies, he noticed that there was something fundamentally different about her. It wasn't the drawn lines that had appeared on her immaculate face, or the sadness that seemed to immerse her amber eyes. It was the way she carried herself, shrunken and depressed, as if she were at a funeral for someone she loved. She slouched in her chair in her blue parka, not sitting up straight, her gaze not high-powered and almighty as usual. She carried herself like a sinner, like someone lost.

And it tugged at him. He could not ignore the months he had spent with her, the months he had spent gazing at her, observing her beauty and grace and wit and talent, could not ignore the person she could be. The person she had been.

Yet he could not have it both ways. He could not claim to have any sort of bond with Princess Azula and claim he was also a loyal follower of the Water Tribe – or even a loyal member of his family. And didn't she deserve justice? Didn't she deserve retribution for all the heartache she had exacted upon so many people?

She had a strange look in her eyes as she stared at him. "You know," she said, "if we were on the same side, we would have been perfect."

A smirk appeared on Sokka's lips. Of course she would say exactly what he had been unwillingly thinking. "Yes," he agreed shortly.

She shook away her hair, a strangely feminine move, and Sokka suddenly had to swallow a lump in his throat. Oh, Spirits. Not now. He couldn't be attracted to her. That wasn't something he could allow.

Sokka sat up a little straighter, lifting his arms, moving his legs slowly. He got out of bed with great effort, and Azula stood up from her chair too. She was so petite, so small for one with such incredible power. Such strength.

Sokka took a shaky step forward and stumbled a little, and then, somehow, they were inches apart, as if magnetized to each other, as if his blue eyes were meant to stare into her golden ones from this tiny distance, the delicate curve of her face tilted upwards –

Before she could stop him, he was suddenly kissing her, his warm lips so sure on hers that she felt weak. She reached her arms around and grabbed hold of his parka as if for dear life, and their bodies fit perfectly close together, and Sokka's left hand buried itself in her midnight hair. Where his fingers touched her it was as if someone had drawn a heated brand over her skin, marking her his, lighting flame and hot desire. The one hand he had on her waist was unbelievably sure, certain, territorial –

And just like that, he was pulling back, looking absolutely shocked, as if he had no idea what he had been doing.

Azula's cheeks were flushed, her eyes dancing with confusion and unspoken words. "Sokka," she whispered, but he held up his index finger and turned away, breathing hard, disbelief etched all over his face. He sighed.

"Spirits, Azula," he murmured. "I shouldn't have done that."

She sat back down and looked quietly at her hands. Then, "No," she agreed quietly. "No, you shouldn't."

* * *

Toph appeared in the doorway, looking agitated and breathless. "Aang!" she said. "You've got to see this. I found something really cool."

Aang hopped off the bed. "I'm always up for really cool stuff," he said. "What is it?"

"Come on, you've just got to see it."

They skated down the rock wall and hopped off at the ground, and then Toph walked briskly across the room towards a doorway with a small, clear crystal above it. No one seemed to be going in or out of this door, like most in the bustling hall. "I don't think I've ever been through this door," Aang commented. Toph nodded briskly.

The hallway was long and winding, smooth stone without any intersections or other doors. Just a long hallway. Then, about five minutes down the hall, it just stopped.

Aang laughed. "Great," he said, "a hallway with nothing on it."

"No, this is where it gets cool," Toph answered with a mischievous smile. She stamped once, hard, on the ground, and steps sank down, leading under the wall immediately opposite them.

Aang looked back the way they came. "Are you sure we're supposed to be here?"

"Come on, stop being such a worrywart, Twinkletoes. This is the most exciting thing we've done the whole time we've been here."

Silently agreeing, Aang followed Toph down the steps. At the end of them was another hallway. This one was more brightly-lit.

Toph turned and stamped again, and the stairs just shot backwards into the wall and ceiling. Aang whistled slowly.

This hallway, too, was disappointingly blank. Aang just followed Toph, who led him around twists and turns, through tunnels in the walls and trapdoors. "Okay," she said after about half an hour. "This is where I feel like there's nothing left. It's strange – I can only feel for a few feet in every direction. It's all fuzzy after that, like there's some weird barrier."

It was a very short segment of hall – maybe twenty feet long, walls at either end. Aang sighed. "Well, if you can't find it, I won't be able to," he said.

Toph shrugged. "We might as well try. There's no way this is all here for nothing."

Aang smiled and began patting his way up and down the walls, carefully avoiding the hot, lit torches.

* * *

Pakku walked up and down the length of the boat, irritated. "Come on, come on," he muttered under his breath. "We don't have all day."

Jeong Jeong approached the Water Tribe canoe that was paddling alongside them. "We are going to go around the side of the glacier to store our ship," he told a Water Tribe warrior. "We need to be ready to leave as soon as possible."

Iroh turned to the young people. "Zuko, Katara, Szeli, you're going to go with me and Piandao into the city while our companions store our boat around the side." Katara nodded at Iroh's calm words. He always seemed completely in control of everything. "Stay close to me and do exactly as I tell you."

They entered the Water Tribe through the half-circle of ice that sunk down below the huge insignia, as Katara had done so many times before. However, the waterbenders soon gave the canoe over to Iroh and Piandao, leaving with their catch. Katara frowned – usually the canoes, when not being used, were stored up on higher levels, nearer the palace, but they were going down some back roads.

Actually, Katara knew exactly where they were going. As they went down a tiny canal towards the wall of the glacier, Katara realized that they were near the spot that connected the city to the top of the glacier, high above.

Piandao quickly tied the canoe to the six-foot-high wall of ice next to them. Zuko, Katara, and Szeli hoisted themselves up onto the wall, while Iroh examined the grate. "It is as I thought," he murmured, and opened the grate. It was unlocked. He shut it again with a clang.

Katara poked her nose into the nearest house, sitting down with a sigh. So someone had used the passage – big deal; she had sometimes just gone in there to sit and think. Why was this so vitally important that they needed to make a week's journey by sea just to –

Suddenly, Katara heard voices from the room in the back of the small house. Oops. She shouldn't have just barged into someone's home like that – it just looked terribly unfurnished. There wasn't any food in the icebox, no personal belongings anywhere.

The timbre of one of the voices was terribly distinctive, though – high and melodic, sort of sweet...

"What are you doing? This is someone's house," Zuko's voice suddenly said from behind her. Katara shushed him quietly and put her ear to the door leading into the room.

"Get Iroh," she hissed to Zuko. "Get everyone."

As soon as they were all there, Katara flung the door open. Her eyes shot open in shock. She had been correct – it was Azula in there, somehow. But it was also Sokka, and his hands were gripping Azula's wrists, and his eyes didn't look friendly at all.

* * *

Aang sent a gust of wind down the hall in frustration, unintentionally putting out the torches. "Dammit," he said.

"What?" Toph asked.

Aang waved a hand. "Nothing. I just accidentally blew out the torches. One mome -"

But he didn't finish talking, because suddenly, a crystalline glow started echoing from where the torches were. Aang nearly laughed aloud. It was exactly like the Cave of Two Lovers.

"Toph," he whispered, "they're glowing."

Then he slid the torch aside and pressed the glowing crystal gently. There was a dragging, rumbling noise, and Toph jumped. "Spirits," she whispered. "Look at this."

She dragged a toe across the floor and pushed her hands away from her. The entire floor slid forwards, into the wall, and Toph lowered the rock they were standing on gently onto a hallway below. This place had an air of finality, and as they looked down the hall, they saw why.

* * *

"S-Sokka?" Katara stuttered. "It's me, Katara. Do you -"

Before she could get any further, Piandao had barged past her and grabbed Azula's arms, tying them tight behind her back. Sokka opened his mouth, completely shocked. The sudden rush of people stopped him from doing anything except gaping.

"Wait," Sokka said suddenly, but no one heard him. His eyes frantically met Azula's as Zuko grabbed some rope from where it was sitting on the bed and tied it around the Princess' torso, restraining her from moving much at all. She didn't say a word to him, just gazed at his face hopelessly.

Sokka didn't know what to do. Here was his own flesh and blood, the sister he'd missed so much. Katara couldn't see him protect Azula, not now that he was in his right mind again. But something felt wrong about this whole situation. It should not have been this repentant, accepting Azula that they were tying up – it should have been that vicious fighter who was so easy to hate. But that was the thing – when it got down to the soul, no one was ever easy to hate, especially not for Sokka. He opened his mouth to voice a protest, but it was swallowed.

His blue eyes stared into Azula's intensely. They had just spoken for half an hour, perfectly civilly, half an hour of feelings and thoughts and wonders. But to see her go without a fight – it somehow validated all that she'd been saying, made it realer than it ever could have been if she'd tried to get away. What she had shown him was not just a cheap bid for trust; it was her true self.

And still, Sokka sat back and let Iroh and Piandao bundle the true Azula into the canoe, taking off before Katara, Zuko, and the other girl standing there even had a chance to get in as well. Sokka sighed. If Azula had wanted to fight, she would have broken free already. Iroh should have known that.

Sokka thought no more, then, because a flurry of blue parka and white fur and dark brown hair collided with him in a deep hug, a wildly sobbing Katara reunited with her brother for the first time in a year. A slow smile spread across Sokka's face, a real smile, a smile he hadn't smiled in quite a long time.

His eyes, though, trailed after that canoe until Azula's gaze was out of sight. She never stopped looking into his eyes. Then she was gone.

The Fire Nation camp was in a panic. Five master benders had burst into camp and were wreaking complete havoc. Jeong Jeong smiled a grim smile as they surrendered gracelessly, using a white shirt as a flag. This invasion was over.

* * *

Aang and Toph walked down the long hallway, peering through the bars into the empty cells that lined the walls. There were at least thirty, but none of them were taken, it seemed.

"Wow," Toph murmured. "I wonder why they need all these cells. It's not like we're taking prisoners of war, or anything." She trailed her fingers down the bars. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.

Aang shrugged. "I don't know." He was feeling uneasy, though. "I think we should probably get out of here. I bet the Grand Masters have some sort of use for these, even if there's no one in there yet."

Toph shushed him. "Wait," she said, "listen. What's that?"

The back of Aang's neck prickled. "Toph, come on," he said, "you're not funny." Her blind eyes glimmered in the torchlight.

"I'm not joking. There's someone else in here. I can feel it."

And Aang shut his eyes and could hear their ragged breathing too. Toph knelt and put a hand to the floor, then stood, and without facing the cell on the end, pointed to it. "It's that one," she said.

Aang lit a small fire in the palm of his hand, walking towards the cell cautiously. "It's locked, right?" he asked Toph. She nodded and followed him.

The person in the cell was tall, with dark hair. He was facing away from them, and his back looked bony, as if he had not been fed. Aang frowned. "Whoever he is, they haven't been feeding him, I don't think," he told Toph.

"Yeah, he's sort of thin, for his height," she muttered. "I wonder who it is."

Aang opened his mouth to alert the man to their presence, wondering who the White Lotus could possibly want to contain in such an inhumane way. Maybe these weren't even White Lotus cells – maybe they had stumbled across a secret Ba Sing Se dungeon, or something.

Then the person turned to face Aang, and the young airbender stumbled backwards, struck, completely horrified. The man in the cell couldn't be there. He couldn't. It wasn't possible.

* * *

The reunion was long and tearful. Katara and Sokka went to their grandmother's house, feeling like they were children again as they ate stewed sea prunes and chatted idly about life in the Northern Water Tribe. Sokka refused point-blank to tell Katara what Azula had done to him – it wasn't something she needed to know, and it hurt to talk about. Similarly, Katara wouldn't tell him a thing about what had happened while she, Toph, and Aang had been imprisoned.

It was completely surreal, the feeling of being with his family, happy, filled with familiar food. The only thing that could have fulfilled his base desires more would be if his father were suddenly to return from Whaletail Island, where Katara said he'd been sent on a recruiting mission.

The warrior was busy for the next few days, making himself a new boomerang and sword, speaking with Master Piandao, catching up with his sister. He was disappointed that Aang and Toph weren't there, too, but Katara said that the masters wouldn't let Aang come along. He didn't know why – why would Aang be needed anywhere more than where Azula was? Unless, of course, Aang was off attempting to defeat the Fire Lord again.

Sokka finally stopped doing things and sat down at the table, alone in his grandmother's house. Of course, as soon as his mind was off-guard, as soon as he wasn't expecting it, thoughts of her filled his mind. Azula. Where was she? What had Iroh and Piandao done with her? Sokka knew he shouldn't care. He had everything he'd longed for. Why would he even be thinking of someone who was by all rights supposed to be his worst enemy?

He couldn't visit her, of course, although he assumed she was in the prison of the Water Tribe, and he knew where that was. It killed him when he slowly realized that he was going to visit her that night, but it was as if he were bewitched. He couldn't help himself from thinking about her, from needing to see her again, her dainty porcelain face, ebony hair elegant and sleek, her shy smile... If nothing else, this needed closure.

It was for this reason that Sokka awoke around two in the morning, snuck out of the house, and made his way towards the palace.

* * *

Azula sat in the cell for three long days, the backs of her feet icy cold as they pressed against her thighs. She hugged her knees to herself and did very little.

Having such a lack of drive to do anything was like an out-of-body experience. Azula was always so goal-oriented, to the point of obsession. Everything was just a stepping stone to a next level. Yet now she felt strangely content just sitting in the icy cell, her bending practically useless in the cold, her hands manacled together just in case. Sand even littered the floors of the entire prison, sticking to the soles of her feet painfully, making it so that she didn't slip on the ice when she got up to walk to her small bed.

Being there was a strange self-deprivation. Azula was sure that she could have found a way out of the cell if she had tried, but she didn't want to try. In fact, she was fine just lying in her bed.

That changed, though, very abruptly.

Waterbenders led several men to the prison later that day, including her higher-ranking officers from the invasion party. Azula sighed. So they hadn't been able to get away.

Two men were placed in the cell next to her just as her dinner clattered through the slot in her door. The words that echoed through the wall stabbed at fevered, angry emotions that had not been riled since her explosion at Sokka's disappearance. The officers clearly didn't know she was in the room next to them, or they never would have spoken about her that way. The words they were speaking were traitorous, treasonous, insidious jabs at her royal pride, which she slowly felt stir back to life as she listened.

"I overheard that Azula just... surrendered us," one said in a gruff voice.

The other spluttered. "Really?" he asked. "She's a traitor? Why?"

The first man sighed. "I don't know. I thought she was too, well, you know, crazy to just give up power like that. Why would she want to do that, anyway?"

His partner replied, "Who knows? I mean, she's completely insane, everyone knows that. But unless this is some sort of tactical bullshit, I don't know what she's doing."

The other agreed. "Also, even if she doesn't have a family who loves her at home, some of us do. I thought she got that."

"Yeah," muttered the other man. "Man, can you imagine being related to her? You'd feel almost obliged to love her."

"Don't think I could do that," was the chortled response. "I wonder when we're going to get let out, though. Do the Water Tribes even have enough civilization to have a court system?"

Azula had heard enough. She buried her face into her pillow, feeling hot anger rise inside her. She would not be treated with such disrespect. She was the daughter of Fire Lord Ozai, the greatest conqueror of the era. She was the greatest firebending prodigy perhaps of all time. To sit in a cell was one thing, but to sit in a cell with honor besmirched was something else entirely.

She sat up and opened her mouth, spitting a tongue of flame out into the air. Her ebony eyebrows met in a fierce 'v', her golden eyes ignited back to life by righteous rage.

She could make this up to her father. She could squash all the rumors. All she had to do was kidnap Chief Arnook, which would likely be relatively simple.

Azula's quick mind sorted through millions of possibilities, settling on one that was relatively simple. A rusty metal pin was sticking out of the bed. She tugged it out and stuck it in her mouth, using the pinhead to jiggle the lock on her cuffs to an open position. With a tiny, quick 'click', she was free of the first obstacle. She slowly massaged her wrists, which were red from the handcuffs.

Azula sighed. Really, no one was up to her level. They should have taken so many more precautions.

It only took a couple of hours to get the door open, using a combination of slow melting and leverage against the lock on the handle. Then she waited until the dead of night.

Slowly walking out into the hallway, Azula made a swift right and exited the prison. As it was the middle of the night, there were two guards at the front door to the prison, but Azula dispatched them both before they could even turn to see her, silently jabbing their pressure points. They dropped like stones, unable to move.

Azula planned as she moved, wondering why the attempts to constrain her were so pathetically feeble. Even Uncle should have known better, as the naïve Water Tribesmen should have.

She was quieter than a cat. Her bare feet were completely numb due to cold – she could feel nothing on them at all.

Her golden eyes scanned the halls in front of her, all exquisitely carved from ice. It was painfully obvious which room belonged to the chief – it was raised onto its own level, was twice as big as any other room, and had a few soft lights in its windows. Azula made her way towards it silently.

* * *

Sokka's feet were quiet on the icy ground as he made his way down to the prisons, but as soon as he reached the door he knew that something was gravely wrong. The two guards were slumped over, unconscious. Sokka closed his eyes, wanting not to believe that after her whole repentance act, she was actually still the same as ever, but as he walked into the prison, he saw the partially-melted door and knew it was true – she had escaped.

The floor was a strange texture. Sokka looked down and saw that it was covered in sand. That was a strange move, he mused. Why would they want sand all over their floor?

Yet it suddenly gave him an advantage.

He walked back out of the prison. The hallway outside had smooth ice floors, and there were grains of sand leading in a very obvious manner after the person who had escaped. Sokka smiled grimly. He could catch her – there was no way the Ty Lee attack Azula had used would last longer than a couple hours at most.

He kept a close eye on the trail of sand, which, admittedly, started to thin after a while. But not long after the trail disappeared completely, Sokka looked up and realized exactly where she was heading.

Sokka cursed and broke into a sprint.

* * *

Azula slowly put one hand on the blue door, wondering if it would creak. Did ice ever creak? Was that possible? How would she prevent that from happening?

As soon as she started pulling on the door, though, a figure smashed into her side, sending her to crash against the ice, her head knocking painfully against the rock-hard floor. "Ow!" she hissed, opening her eyes.

Her assailant was Sokka. She couldn't believe it. Like a recurring dream, he showed up exactly where he didn't need to be, over and over and over.

"Why are you here?" Sokka said. "You said you'd changed. You said you didn't want to be this person anymore. You said to escape all these decisions you'd just get locked up. You said you'd be happy that way."

Azula averted her eyes. Yes, she wanted to be free from decisions that were impossible to make, but –

"They insulted my honor," she murmured. "The soldiers in the cell next to me. They said that I was a traitor, that I was crazy. If rumors of me just surrendering the entire attack force get back to Fire Lord Ozai, to my father... then I'll go down in history as some insane person, some stupid little girl who cracked under pressure."

Sokka stared at her. "It's perfectly normal to crack under pressure," he said as if she were the most idiotic of eight-year-olds.

"It's not normal for me!" Azula spat, her golden eyes blazing. Sokka closed his eyes and sighed through his nose.

"Listen, Azula -"

"No!" she said. "I'm done listening. I'm done caring. I'm done being weak and always running back to what you have to say."

"You think you're weak?" asked Sokka, disbelief in every shadow on his face.

"No. Yes."

Sokka chuckled quietly, looking up at the ceiling and wondering if Azula knew what 'irony' was. "Look, Azula, you were the strongest you'd ever been when you decided you were going to stay in that cell. You have no idea how much strength that takes. This? Submitting to outside pressures? This doesn't take any courage at all."

Azula swallowed hard, her heart racing. She stood up slowly. What was she going to do? Sokka was sounding as rational, as utterly correct as usual.

So she did the only thing she could, which was to run. She opened the door to Arnook's room and fled inside.

Sokka followed before she could shut the door.

It was dark in Arnook's room, save for two glimmering candles by the windows and moonlight streaming through those windows. There was a hush of sleep that Sokka didn't dare break. The dark lump of Arnook's sleeping form in his bed looked so vulnerable. "Look, Azula," Sokka whispered, "you don't have to do this. You don't have to do what other people's opinions dictate."

"You don't understand," Azula whispered back furiously, her golden eyes speaking some inexpressible emotion, though it was dulled by the darkness of the room.

"You're right," Sokka said. "I don't understand. I don't get why you feel like you have to do this."

Azula's heart jumped into her throat. What was she doing? Why was she about to take a man back to the Fire Nation for certain torture, when that was the very thing she had sworn from doing? She was standing a couple feet from Arnook, by his bedside. She closed her eyes and swayed, swallowing desperately, attempting to find some mental justification for it, but all that reasoning had fled her mind. A small, strangled noise escaped her mouth.

"Azula," Sokka's low voice said. She opened her eyes a crack. Sokka was little more than a foot from her.

"Yes?" she asked.

"You have two choices," Sokka told her. "You can walk out of this room with Chief Arnook paralyzed, and I'll call every guard within a mile. You'll be back in the cell before you can blink."

"Or?"

Sokka placed two hands on her shoulders. "Or you can kiss me, reassure me that you've changed, and I will never judge you."

Azula closed her eyes again. Sokka kept talking. "I mean, Azula, think about it. I'm the only person who has ever, any time at all, accepted who you are without question. I understand you have trouble with people, with acceptance, with image. What does it matter, though?"

Azula looked up at his soft blue eyes. He said, "None of the Fire Nation's citizens have ever got to know you. Not one. I have. Would you rather lose their respect or mine?" He paused for a second. "So, what'll it be? You can try to save your so-called honor, which will be fruitless, anyway. Or you can kiss me."

She whispered with a lot more confidence than she felt, "I don't have to choose between those two painfully obvious options, my dear Water Tribe simpleton. There's always a third choice." And that third choice was what Azula always took, the choice that made her different, that identified her as the genius. She'd had to make that third choice her whole life, be better than everyone else for her entire existence.

"There doesn't have to be a third choice," murmured Sokka, and as if she'd been waiting for him to say it, before he could get another word out, Azula was kissing him furiously, her hands lightly entwined in his.

She didn't have to be afraid to be normal. Sokka was right. She didn't know how not kidnapping Arnook could help her get ahead, but it was better, Azula mused impersonally, to preserve her neglected conscience than to fall behind for once in her life.

They pulled apart, and Sokka enfolded her in a gentle embrace. Azula's head rested against his warm chest. She swallowed. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

Then lights flared on from all around the room. A warm voice said, "Excellent."

* * *

Aang stared at the face hovering in the darkened cell in front of him.

Fire Lord Ozai.

"Oh... Spirits," he whispered, catching himself before he toppled in absolute alarm.

"What is it?" Toph asked urgently.

Aang collected himself. "Ozai," he said.

Toph yelled, "WHAT?"

It couldn't be a mistake. The man in front of them, dank and dirty though he was, was unmistakably the Fire Lord. Aang couldn't believe it. A sick feeling surged through his stomach.

Was this some sort of bad joke? A decoy? A costume? But no, it couldn't be. The face that haunted his every nightmare was just two feet from him, in the flesh. And suddenly, Aang felt irrationally terrified. The fact that the Fire Lord wasn't speaking, or really even moving, was unbelievably unnerving.

"Let's go," he whispered to Toph, and nearly had a heart attack as Fire Lord Ozai moved slightly, making it evident that his hands were completely restrained, arms spread wide by chains, feet linked together and secured with a heavy iron ball.

"Spirits, let's go, Toph," he hissed, and they fled.

Aang couldn't swallow it. This meant that – what could this mean? It meant that the White Lotus had managed an entirely silent deposition. Ozai had been here for Spirits-knew-how-long, had probably not been issuing orders for weeks and weeks. The Order of the White Lotus had been running the bad guys, ordering around Fire Nation soldiers frivolously. Why?

* * *

Sokka squinted around. Emerging from the furniture were bright torches, lit by – lit by Iroh, Piandao, Pakku, and Jeong Jeong.

What?

"What?" Sokka blurted. "What are you doing here?"

Azula stared around, openmouthed.

Iroh smiled. "We played to your vanity, Princess Azula. We made it painfully easy for you to find your way here, to a decoy Arnook."

Sokka stared at the lump in the bed, which suddenly seemed suspiciously immobile.

"Cushions," Jeong Jeong explained shortly. "A test."

"You passed," added Iroh. "We had to know."

Azula said, "Know what?"  
Sokka stared around at the impassive faces of the masters. Iroh continued, "Know whether you were trustworthy. We had suspected since a while after you and young Sokka here started to be friends... We had suspected that you were changing."

"This next bit may come as a bit of a shock to you," Jeong Jeong said gruffly. "You'd better take a seat."

For once, Azula did exactly as she was told, without question.

Iroh said, "Your father has been sick. Very sick."

Azula nodded. "I know."

Her uncle shook his head. "No, you don't. It's a lie. Ever since he 'fell sick' months ago, he hasn't been in the Palace giving orders. In fact, he hasn't even been in the Fire Nation. The Order of the White Lotus has been giving 'his' orders through that speaker leading out of his chambers."

Azula's golden eyes stared around in complete disbelief. Were they joking? This had to be some sort of prank. She glanced from one unfamiliar master to the other. "Then, this mission – the letters from my father?"

Iroh shook his head. "No, that was all fabricated. No one was ever in real danger. We've... well, we've set this situation up to lead to this point. You didn't kill anyone when you could have. You didn't kidnap Arnook. In essence, you're a new person. The Azula I knew of a year ago would have taken the chief without question, would have jumped at the chance to wipe out the 'Water Tribe savages'."

Azula could only ask, her voice low and broken, "Why did you do all this?"

Another figure made its way out from behind a blue drape. "Because of me," Prince Zuko said, his scratchy voice startling Azula in its suddenness.

"You?" Azula spat in disbelief. "Zuzu? Why are you here?"

Zuko didn't react to the nickname with more than a dry smile. "I've changed, Azula. I don't trust myself with power. Or anything else, for that matter. I refused to inherit the throne, as did Uncle. That only left you in the Royal Family, but we didn't know if you could be trusted."

Sokka was absolutely stunned. He stared at Zuko and felt revolted, felt revolted by all the masters, too – everyone he loved and respected. He had just been a pawn in this plot, the whole time. Then Azula rounded on him and asked, "Did you know about this?"

Sokka spluttered. "No!" he said. "I'm actually feeling very used right now. Like I'm just some chess player that the White Lotus happened to move."

Piandao grinned. "You're no pawn, Sokka. You're the queen. You've changed everything."

Then Sokka needed to sit down. The moral dilemma he had lost so much sleep over – Azula sending for the poison from her father – there was never any chance of that happening. It was as if Sokka had been living in a dream world, as if none of it led to any result, any purpose at all –

As Piandao so often did, he spoke addressing that which Sokka had not voiced aloud. "These months have not been a waste of your time, Sokka. We have a Fire Lord now. That is the most important thing. We could not have kept up the fake sickness for much longer – a few of the generals are starting to question what exactly is making the Fire Lord so sick..."

Iroh told Azula, "Are you ready to lead your country? As soon as possible, we must install you as Fire Lord. Your story for being next in succession will be that you saw the Fire Lord committing suicide. No one will dare question you."

Azula whispered, "You haven't -"

"No, no, we haven't killed him," interrupted Pakku harshly. "Look, girl, stop looking like a baby moose-lion. Do you understand what you have to do? Your job is to withdraw all the troops, to give the Earth Kingdom back all its land, to focus on internal stability in the Fire Nation. Basically, you have to find ways to completely undo all the chaos your ancestors have wrought. Do you get it?"

Azula looked at her uncle. "I'm ending the war?" she asked in a small voice. Suddenly, she felt very young and very innocent, as if this were her chance to start anew, as if this were her chance to erase all the evil she had helped exact in her past. Her eyes met Sokka's, and he gave her a smile – that smile he always saved just for her, the slight smirk, but with gentle eyes. The smile said, I believe in you.

Iroh nodded and slowly smiled at her. "Azula, I never thought I could see the day," he said in a low rumble. "The day when I could trust you with the future of the Fire Nation."

He paused and wiped his eyes sappily. Then with that smell of tea that Azula knew so well, he ran to her and suddenly enfolded her in a hug, saying in a muffled, tearful voice, "That day is finally here."

Azula didn't know what to do, so she just let him hug her. It was the first time in her life that she didn't pull away.

* * *

**D'awww sappy Iroh. Gotta love him.**

**Anyway – speedy update. New thing for me, heheh. I hope you enjoyed it. Just so you know, if you didn't catch it, that was the climax of the plot, so if you think it lacked impact or something, don't hesitate to tell me so... IN A REVIEW :D**

**There's still some cool stuff that's going to happen in the next chapter, which I'm pretty sure will be the last – and then probably a prologue. So stick around.**

**Thanks,**

**Speechwriter.**


	17. Recollections are Dangerous to Behold

"Why didn't you tell me?" Aang asked Bumi, hurt in his wide grey eyes. Bumi shrugged.

"I suppose it just never came up in conversation," laughed the crazy old king.

Aang spluttered. "Of course it didn't 'just come up in conversation'! But I'm the Avatar! I thought it was my mission to kill him, to defeat all this tyranny!"

Toph stepped forward. "Yeah, you crazy old man. Aang has been training to fight Ozai for years now. The very least you could do is tell him when you capture him, for Spirits' sake."

Bumi leaned forwards over the stone table, a serious look in his crazed eyes. "Aang," he said, "your mission is to defeat all tyranny in the world. Ozai was the most serious of threats, but he was by no means the only one."

Aang snorted, "Oh, yeah, all tyranny. In the world. No pressure." Toph sniggered in response.

King Bumi sighed. "You could not have known. Katara especially could not have been allowed to know. You must tell no one. Do not tell Katara. Do not tell _anyone._ And now, young ones, you must leave. I have to clip my nose hairs."

Toph and Aang exchanged disgusted glances. "Okay," Aang sighed. "Just... next time you do something that's going to drastically alter the course of my life, could you tell me?" But Bumi had already whipped out a tiny pair of extremely dangerous-looking scissors and was crossing his eyes to look down at his nose. Aang and Toph fled.

* * *

It took five long night hours for Sokka, Azula, Zuko, Pakku, Iroh, Jeong Jeong and Piandao to work out the details of what their next step would be. The first thing the group did was to obliterate the evidence of where Azula had gone after breaking free from the cell. Next, Jeong Jeong burned one of the canoes in the pile that the fishermen took out on trips so that they could suggest Azula stole it and they could "chase her down", while actually giving her passage to the Fire Nation.

The rest was planning. Planning what they were going to say to various questions, how they could get Azula to stow away on their ship without anyone noticing. Eventually, they decided on Jeong Jeong's course of action – Sokka and Zuko would both come on the ship to "hunt down Azula" so they didn't have to lie too terribly much, while the masters would order the others to stay behind and scour the city and glacier for Azula.

The next day was a long and tired one. Each person involved had to act like they had gotten more than two hours of sleep apiece, had to act like they were genuinely worried that Azula might have escaped and fled back to the Fire Nation. Azula herself hid belowdecks on the White Lotus' ship until six o'clock at night, when the others managed to get away from the Northern Water Tribe under the pretense of tracking her down.

It was unfortunate that no one could know of Azula's new course of action in the world, but Pakku put it very rationally. He said that if they were just to declare that Azula was "good now", no one would believe it, and would either accuse them of being traitors or of being too stupid to see an Azula trick around the corner. Pakku said that the best way for Azula to show that she had changed was to prove it by changing the course of Fire Nation history.

Azula slept the whole day. She had strange dreams, dreams involving clouds and mist and mountains, and when she woke up she felt as if she were still dreaming.

Everything had happened so suddenly, like immersion into an ice bath. All of a sudden, she had everything she had ever wanted. She had her country at her fingertips, with no pressure from her father to carry out orders that impinged upon her abused sense of right and wrong. She had the palace. She had respect, without fear, from several people. She had her own choices to make. No one could exile her; no one could dishonor her except herself, and so she would make up for the besmirched name of the Fire Nation of the last one hundred years. No more tyranny.

That was not to say that Azula wouldn't rule with an iron fist. No, she expected her orders to be carried out quickly and precisely, as usual. She just wouldn't occupy other countries. After all, Azula mused, wouldn't it be better just to focus on perfecting the Fire Nation down to the last grain of sand on the last beach than to spread mediocrity and warfare throughout the world? She had never really believed in all that Avatar stuff about balance, but some of it made sense. It was logical to stay within one's accepted borders.

But she couldn't call herself happy. Everything she had ever wanted, her whole life, and she wouldn't say she was happy, exactly. Why was that?

Perhaps it was because Azula was intelligent nearly beyond belief, and she knew the feeling of inevitability. She knew the feeling of casting off and inevitably reaching a shore and inevitably doing something she inevitably would not want to do a bit.

* * *

Katara was fuming. How could the Order of the White Lotus have allowed this? Why hadn't they frozen Azula inside a huge block of ice and let her suffocate? Why hadn't they chained her to the wall of a dank dungeon, let her rot, and not allowed her the slightest possibility of escape? How could they have let this happen?

All Katara knew was that the girl who had tortured and nearly killed her, her closest friends, and her brother, was at large once more, and she couldn't have that happening.

Oh, and then Iroh had the nerve to tell her, "Katara, you must lead the others in a search of the glacier. Sokka, Zuko, I, and the rest of the masters are going to lead a hunt by sea – we likely shall not be back for quite a while." Just like that. After not having seen her brother in his right mind for a year? An entire year? And then a simple 'we won't be back for a while'. A WHILE.

Katara smashed a blade of ice into the water of the canal, letting out a half-scream of rage. Spirits, why was her misfortune so sweetly ironic? She had contacted Aang telling him all the good news just a few minutes before she had found out how it had all gone to pot. Now Aang would be relieved, would have his hopes up, and she would have to hurt him, when that was the last thing she ever wanted to do.

A very ugly look appeared on Katara's face as she flopped down on the snowy walkway above the canal, staring into the grey sky. As quickly as Sokka had come back, he was gone again. Just like her father. Just like everything else in her life.

For a moment, she understood why Zuko and Azula were so messed up. This was how they felt all the time – deprived of all that mattered.

* * *

Sokka walked down belowdecks, his feet stepping lightly on the soft wood. He made his way to the last room on the right and opened the door.

"Azula?" he whispered.

She was lying as if asleep, but she was not asleep. As she tilted her head upwards, Sokka could see a slightly green, pallid tint to her pale skin. "How do you stand these canoe things?" she moaned.

Sokka laughed. "Sea-sick?" he asked.

Azula shuddered. "I'm so glad the Fire Nation uses metal steamships instead of this primitive wooden type of construction," she simpered, a tiny smirk making its way onto her face in the dim light. Sokka snorted.

"Don't you get all superior on me," he said, "because you know very well that in a contest for building things, I would be the clear winner."

"Oh really?" Azula laughed, sitting up. "I'd like to see that happen." She smiled a tired smile.

Sokka sat next to her on the bed, and she put her head on his shoulder lightly. Sokka could smell her sweet jasmine scent drifting towards him, and he placed a strong arm idly around her shoulder. "This must be weird for you," he murmured.

"What do you mean?" Azula asked. "Getting what I want? I always used to get what I wanted, to a degree."

He shook his head. "Being free, I mean," he clarified. "No one can tell you what to do anymore."

She let her silence be her agreement.

"Well, except me," Sokka added, and Azula punched him lightly.

She took her head from his shoulder and looked into his face with a genuine, honest-to-goodness grin. "I'd like to see you try to order the new Fire Lord around," she said.

He said, "Kiss me."

She did.

* * *

Iroh took note of the bird flying by. "Is that a pelican tern?" he asked Zuko.

"How should I know?" muttered Zuko.

Iroh sighed. "You were supposed to undergo years of studying different animals as part of your royal tutoring, Zuko," he chided.

Zuko laughed. "That got cut very short, remember?"

"Yes, yes," Iroh sighed loudly, and scribbled something down on a sheet of paper about the bird.

"You seem agitated, Uncle," said Zuko, sitting down with concern on his face.

The older man looked at his nephew and let out a long sigh through his nose. "Is Sokka down there with Azula?" he asked Zuko, who nodded. "It is exactly that about which I am worried," continued Iroh. "I do not know what Sokka is thinking about what will happen when they reach the Fire Nation, but he can not just step off the boat and join the Fire Nation as Azula's advisor, or court her in a manner proper to a Fire Lord."

Zuko swallowed. His uncle had a point, and Zuko didn't even want to think about what Sokka's sister might do to any number of people if it were revealed that Sokka still loved Azula in his right state of mind.

Yet seeing the two together put Zuko strangely at ease. Sokka exuded confidence, control, rationality – all the qualities that Azula lacked at the worst of times. He was the perfect glue to hold Azula together, the perfect paper to sand down her harsh, impulsive edges. How could they just tear them apart?

"What are we supposed to do?" Zuko asked.

Iroh sighed again. "That, my nephew, is why I am agitated."

* * *

It only took four days to reach the Fire Nation. The ship had to go quickly, so as not to garner too much suspicion from the people they were leaving in the Northern Water Tribe.

Azula stood proudly at the bow, stopping any and all Fire Nation ships that came anywhere near their humble canoe-type ship. She had gotten quite used to the homey bowels of the wooden boat, and had even spoken with Sokka about perhaps perfecting the design into a local type of fleet. Sokka had laughed and said that firebenders would never deign to use canoes.

Azula had practically assumed that because Sokka was coming along, he would be getting off the boat with her and staying in the palace with her. In this, she was nearly naïve, like a child that didn't understand why lying was wrong. She couldn't comprehend why it couldn't happen. So when, at last, they set down anchor by the Fire Nation Palace, Azula was to receive an unpleasant awakening.

Azula woke up. It was seven in the morning, and gray rays of sun were sneaking up over the ridge of mountains. They weren't sailing, just bobbing up and down in a familiar harbor.

She had slept on the deck, looking up at the black sky and the stars and thinking. Thinking hard about everything. Shouldn't she be at least moderately angered by being led on for the past few months of her life? Shouldn't she be angry at herself for letting something slip under the radar?

Then again, it had never been her place to question the actions of the Fire Lord aloud, no matter what suspicions she might have possessed. Still, though – the manipulation was unsettling at best, suspect at worst.

Her eyes observed the sky, which was slowly being infiltrated with a light blue, tendrils of smoky cloud rising pink from the hidden sun. This palace, and everything in it, was hers. Her father, an unpredictable terror of a man, dictator of her every move and her every emotion, just was no longer there. It was hard to comprehend, especially now that she looked at the splendor of the palace just sitting there as it always had.

Azula's heart suddenly felt light, a strange and swooping sensation that she had only experienced a few times before. She felt buoyed by this new energy. Soon she would disembark and would be able to rejuvenate the country, with Sokka at her right-hand side.

So she turned over on her thin mattress, drew her blanket more fully over herself, and slept more.

When she awoke again, it was probably around eight or nine in the morning, and most of the crew were on board, busily fussing around with various ship functions. Azula rose and stretched.

Sokka approached her. "Azula," he greeted. "How did you sleep?"

She smiled. "Well."

"That's good," he said. "I think right now we're just rolling up the sails. We'll probably only be here for about a day, but we don't want to drift."

Azula nodded. "When should I go inside the palace? News of the Fire Lord's so-called suicide won't be easy to break to the people in there."

Sokka winced. "I don't envy you that," he said. "What's your plan?"

Azula had already developed a plan, of course. "I'll go around to the back and make a hole and a few scorch marks in the back of the throne room. From there, there aren't terribly many guards, so it would be easy to think of him running over that last hill and just taking a dive. I'm not going to pretend to know why he did it, but a few of the generals are more than a little superstitious. And those who aren't superstitious are paranoid. We can use his 'suicide' to say that perhaps my father was uneasy with the state of the Fire Nation's strikes, and so we can make a beginning strike to stop the war."

"Sounds good," Sokka said with a dizzying grin. "Wow, it's hot down here. I forgot."

Azula smirked. "One could expect that from an equatorial climate, Sokka." She leaned over the side of the ship, looking at the spread of the palace. Sokka put a warm arm around her. She leaned her head into his shoulder and closed her eyes against the gorgeous sunrise, preferring instead to focus on the soft, sure clamp of Sokka's hand on her shoulder, the sound of his light breathing in the morning air.

It was ruined by her uncle.

"Azula," Iroh said, "we have to talk."

The seven of them onboard gathered on the deck to speak with each other. Sokka sat next to Azula, Zuko across from them, and Pakku, Iroh, Jeong Jeong, and Piandao sat in a tight-knit row. Azula repeated her plan of action exactly as she had before.

"When you say 'we', who exactly do you mean?" asked Jeong Jeong.

"Well, of course, Uncle, Zuzu, myself, and Sokka," Azula chuckled. "Whom else would I mean?"

The four masters exchanged glances that Azula definitely didn't like. "What is it?" she asked sharply. "What are you not telling me?"

Sokka took her hand, calming her slightly. She scanned the faces of the masters – they looked uneasy.

"Sokka cannot stay here," Pakku said in a low voice.

There was a very, very long silence.

Azula asked in a dangerously soft voice, "What?"

"Sokka cannot stay here," Pakku repeated. "He would be estranged from his family, friends, and the entire Water Tribe if he were to defect to the Fire Nation in the world's greatest time of need. Remember, no one can know that the White Lotus deposed Ozai. No one can know that you, Azula, are acting out of anything besides your own personal desire. That has a name – treason."

Sokka swallowed, his hand feeling limp in Azula's tight grip. Thoughts were chasing through his mind. He couldn't stay with Azula? There was no possible way they could be together? How could he trust her to make the right choice? Her uncle would be there to help her along the way, of course, and Zuko, but when it got right down to it, Sokka felt like no one could understand what she needed to hear better than he could. Iroh was on intellectual par with Azula, but he did not think in the same way that she did anymore. He didn't think tactically.

"I can come and see you," Sokka said to Azula quietly.

"No. No, you can't," Jeong Jeong argued, a strangely disappointed tone to his gruff voice. "You must not come to the Fire Nation unless it is for the sake of diplomacy. You couldn't sneak past the guards, and this place won't likely just be allowing in visitors for the sake of visitors. Especially not to the Fire Lord herself."

Azula drew in breath shortly. "So," she said in a low, cutting sneer, "you're going to take Sokka from me? After everything you've already taken? You've manipulated me, you've struck my father from his office, you've deceived every level of command in my army, you've made a laughingstock out of this country, and now you're undermining my own personal feelings? Honestly, I thought the White Lotus could do better than that."

She stood up, her voice rising. "If I'm going to run this country, I need someone here to help me – someone who understands me. You don't understand. I can no longer simply use firebending to fix everything in my path, if I'm to be a rational leader, but that's not in my nature." She took a deep breath. "This is unorthodox, sloppy, and entirely unsatisfactory, and this will not be the foundation upon which I shall lay my rule as Fire Lord!"

Azula stormed downstairs, her eyes burning, her fists clenched.

Everyone else sat in mortified silence. "I'm sure she didn't mean that," Sokka said softly.

"I'm pretty sure she meant that," Zuko replied.

Sokka stood up and followed her, leaving behind him an uneasy wake. Surely Azula couldn't back out now? Every member of the White Lotus had counted on her nearly fanatical patriotism to guide the entire effort. With cultivation and shaping by Iroh and Zuko, Azula would make a powerful leader... But not if she refused to take the crown, which was a day that Zuko never thought he would see.

* * *

Sokka walked in without knocking. Azula was on the bed, facedown, racked with vibrations. Muffled screams echoed from her pillow, into which she had buried her face and was now yelling as hard as she could. Her legs thrashed around, and then she stopped and breathed for a few moments, only to start screaming again seconds later.

When Sokka's hand rested on her shoulder lightly, Azula flipped over. Her face was red with rage, but her eyes were stubbornly dry. "How could they do this to me?" she hissed. "How could you do this to me?"

He had not expected that. Sokka drew back, repulsed by her words. "How could _I_ do this?" he asked. "Are you joking? I haven't done anything. Do you think I want to be away from you? Do you think I want to have to hide this from everyone I know? Do you think I never want to see you again? I didn't know a thing about this, Azula."

Azula sighed. "I didn't really mean that. I just don't understand why you can't stay here with me."

"My family," Sokka replied. "They are and will always be the most important thing in my life."

His blue eyes held her flickering golden gaze steady. All of a sudden, they were buried in each other's arms. Sokka whispered in Azula's ear, "You're going to be such a visionary leader."

She nodded and said throatily, "I'll do my best to do what you would do."

Sokka laughed and drew away, holding onto her delicate hands as if grasping lifelines. "Azula," he murmured, "I will write you. All the time. About anything. Anything you want to hear, and anything you don't. Stupid stuff, like what I'm eating, what I do every day without you. Just..."  
"Anything," Azula said softly, "to feel like you're still here. Don't expect to get off the hook for advising me, just because you won't... be here. I expect advice to be sent to me frequently."

And just like that, they were kissing, a kiss that held a disturbing note of finality in its depths, furious, passionate, mad, fevered. A desperate kiss that longed for more kisses to follow, but the only thing that could follow was the pair walking up to the deck. Then, to follow that, Azula grasping Sokka's hand until the very last second she walked onto the gangplank. And, at last, Sokka standing on the bow and seeing Azula's small figure, flanked by those of Iroh and Zuko, remain on the pier and watch the boat sail back into the clear blue day.

* * *

Toph and Aang saddled up Appa. Upon instruction from Bumi, they were supposed to leave Ba Sing Se and make their way to the North Pole to meet with Katara. For Aang had just received a letter from Katara that said that they had found Sokka, and he was in his right mind again.

The thought of the four being together again was dizzying, insane. Toph didn't even have any smartass comments to make. They just wordlessly prepared themselves to leave, and Toph mumbled, "I will not miss this place at all."

Aang smiled. "You say that every time."

Aang had been thinking for a while. If Fire Lord Ozai was here, who did that leave to rule the country? Azula, of course, but the White Lotus would never allow that, not in a million years. She was too insane. Iroh never wanted power. That just left Zuko, and Aang was uneasy about the idea of forgiving Zuko for the millionth time. Of course, if he were to be Fire Lord, then he wouldn't need Aang's blessing or forgiveness. He would just have to try to repair the country.

As Appa rose into the black sky, Aang looked down at the sprawl of Ba Sing Se, nearly unable to believe that none of the millions of people in that city knew who was hidden below the surface.

* * *

Azula was trying to let her anger go, but no matter how viciously she trained and pushed herself physically, she couldn't detach herself emotionally or mentally. She was full of resentment and pain, and nothing Zuko or Iroh said made it any better. Their lie had gone off without a hitch – a bodiless funeral for Ozai occurred two days after Azula returned, and her coronation was today.

The most important day of her life. Her coronation. What she had looked forward to since Zuko had left and removed himself from the royal line.

She couldn't feel anything.

Azula sat down in a chair, handmaidens scrubbing at her feet and washing her hair in a long trough filled with warm water. She closed her eyes, not eating the cherries being offered to her, not reacting to anything that was happening.

She didn't even react much when, in front of hundreds, her advisor placed the crown onto her head.

She walked back to her room, very quietly shut the door, and sat down on her bed, a long piece of paper in front of her. She lifted her ink pen and finally brought herself to write.

Dear Sokka.

Thoughts of him inundated her mind. She choked them back with her tears and kept writing page upon page.

Then, when she had sent the letter off in a messenger hawk, Azula stood up, donned her armor, flexed her fingers, and felt slow strength building in her. Sokka wouldn't want her just to sit there and be useless. He would want her to start fixing everything. So she would put herself aside, as she had always done, and put her country first. Put her duty first.

It was unavoidable that she would have to give up the one person she loved for the one thing she loved, but that didn't make it hurt any less.

Azula's boots clicked down the long stone hallway. Two men opened the doors of the Fire Lord's chamber as she walked inside.

She crouched low and fired a blast of blue flame into the gutter in front of the throne. It flared up and slowly turned orange.

She sat stiffly onto the throne and smiled a grim smile.

This was what she was born to do.

Her voice didn't even waver as she ordered, "Get the generals. Get my brother and uncle. They have a very important meeting to attend. Immediately."

* * *

The eight days Sokka had been gone felt like an age. Katara wondered how she had gone so long without him. Strangely, though, when he got back, he seemed weary and exhausted, as if he had undergone some great ordeal looking for Azula.

Katara couldn't seem to get through to him anymore. She acted in her same familiar nurturing way, but Sokka didn't seem to react much. She suspected it was some sort of temporary mental scar from what Azula had done to him, but she was afraid to mention it. She hoped that Aang and Toph showing up, which they were bound to do any day now, would fix things. She hoped that desperately.

The first day Sokka had returned kept replaying in Katara's mind. "What's wrong?" Katara had asked. Sokka had walked into their grandmother's house looking unusually dejected.

Sokka had looked up at her, his eyes tired, and had given Katara a wan, haunting smile. "Nothing," he had said. "We just couldn't hold onto her. Not for long enough."

_**Fin**_

* * *

**I'm sorry! It had to happen.**

**Yup, that's the end. But there will be an epilogue. I think I mistakenly wrote prologue in the last chapter. Sorry about that.**

**Thanks so much for bearing with me, through thick and thin, slow updates included. I hope you did enjoy the story – it has its flaws. I don't have a beta reader or anything; my updates are pretty raw. So I may come back in a while and do some serious editing.**

**See you in the epilogue!**

**Speechwriter**


	18. Epilogue

**Okay. So, an interesting thing I've done here – I've written two versions of the epilogue. Feel free to choose between the two – one starts here, and one is after the break about halfway down the page.**

**It's been great. Thanks so much for your support, and I'll see you in the next story!**

**Speechwriter**

* * *

Peace talks were progressing well. Remarkably well, in fact. It had only been two years since Fire Lord Azula had withdrawn the first troops from Omashu, and already the Fire Nation was preparing itself economically to pay retribution to the Earth Kingdom. Emissaries from the three nations were meeting at the Fire Lord's palace to work out the terms.

Azula combed back her hair, slinging it into its topknot and sliding her royal emblem onto the bun. She looked at herself in the mirror, dressed in her typical armor and a large, red cape befitting of the Fire Lord. At twenty years old, she was holding up well, given the huge amount of responsibility with which she had been burdened.

Azula would never admit it, but her brother and uncle had been invaluable in the last two years, as had the letters that streamed to her from the Northern Water Tribe, helping her with some of the tougher decisions. The letters had stopped, though, a year ago, without visible cause or warning. Azula had written a few since then, but had received no reply. She had dismissed the fact and carried on with her duties. People dropped out of touch. That was just how it was sometimes – but now – to see him again – maybe it wouldn't matter. A bubble of hope had swelled in her chest.

She opened the door and walked outside, preparing to greet the first group of emissaries, those from the Water Tribe. She gave a stiff nod to Chief Arnook and his second-in-command, Hakoda, who were heading the regal party of very impractically-dressed warriors and diplomats.

And though she tried to resist it, her eyes furiously scanned the faces of every Water Tribe member getting off the ship.

It was not dramatic when he walked onto the gangplank. There was no pomp, no fanfare, although Azula could feel her heart freezing stock still as his eyes made his way to hers and stayed there unassumingly.

And then he walked down the gangplank, closely followed by his sister, Toph, and Aang. Katara managed a businesslike nod, Aang a polite bow, Toph a loud "Yo." Azula's mouth quivered into a smile at Toph's lack of decorum. But Sokka didn't acknowledge her any further than just locking stares and then slowly looking away.

His blue eyes looked back at the ship, and Azula's eyes followed his glance. Sokka stopped walking, waiting for someone.

Azula's heart felt as if it would drop out of her chest as a pretty, tan girl walked over the gangplank to join Sokka, Aang, Toph, and Katara. Her fear was confirmed as she took Sokka's hand in hers.

That bubble of hope in Azula's chest was punctured. She swayed slightly, then abruptly looked away, back at the head of the train, back at what was supposed to be important. Diplomacy. Order. Balance.

Her thoughts were in complete disarray, but she forced herself to calm down, arranged her mind into its usual logical formation, and shuttled her emotions away. She swallowed. Her lips turned down slightly at the sides – that was all she allowed herself. Country first, self second. Country first. Always.

The train of Water Tribe members made its way inside the palace.

Azula's eyes followed that stupid, stunted ponytail of Sokka's as it went through the doors. She swallowed. Country first.

Azula mechanically turned to the arriving Earth Kingdom fleet.

The door of the palace slammed shut with a boom as the last Water Tribe member walked over the threshold.

Country first.

Azula's eyes squinted shut, as if blocking out the bright sun, and the back of her hand hastily destroyed the evidence of a tear that had dared to drip down her face.

She smiled and bowed to the Earth King.

Country first.

x

x

x

* * *

x

x

x

Peace talks were progressing well. Remarkably well, in fact. It had only been two years since Fire Lord Azula had withdrawn the first troops from Omashu, and already the Fire Nation was preparing itself economically to pay retribution to the Earth Kingdom. Emissaries from the three nations were meeting at the Fire Lord's palace to work out the terms.

Azula combed back her hair, slinging it into its topknot and sliding her royal emblem onto the bun. She looked at herself in the mirror, dressed in her typical armor and a large, red cape befitting of the Fire Lord. At twenty years old, she was holding up well, given the huge amount of responsibility with which she had been burdened.

Azula would never admit it, but her brother and uncle had been invaluable in the last two years, as had the constant letters that streamed to her from the Northern Water Tribe, helping her with some of the tougher decisions.

She opened the door and walked outside, preparing to greet the first group of emissaries, those from the Water Tribe. She gave a stiff nod to Chief Arnook and his second-in-command, Hakoda, who were heading the regal party of very impractically-dressed warriors and diplomats.

And though she tried to resist it, her eyes furiously scanned the faces of every Water Tribe member getting off the ship.

It was not dramatic when he walked onto the gangplank. There was no pomp, no fanfare, although Azula could feel her heart freezing stock still as his eyes made his way to hers and stayed there unassumingly.

And then he walked down the gangplank, closely followed by his sister, Toph, and Aang. Katara managed a businesslike nod, Aang a polite bow, Toph a loud "Yo." Azula's mouth quivered into a smile at Toph's lack of decorum. But Sokka didn't acknowledge her any further than just locking stares and then slowly looking away.

It was later in the evening that everyone had arrived and was settling in. There was to be a banquet, so Azula had donned her finest robes and emblems, but as she was pinning up her hair, the door to her room opened, letting in a crack of white sunlight.

She turned, and suddenly a pair of strong hands were on her hips, securing her in place as familiar lips kissed her own. They broke apart for air after what seemed like an hour, and Azula stared up into Sokka's face, so familiar, even after so long.

"Thank you for writing," she said formally, but Sokka placed a finger to her lips.

"I've got to go in a minute, or my family will get suspicious – but I just thought you might want to know that I'll be staying here over the next year. I'm going to be the Water Tribe's ambassador."

Azula's eyes opened wide. She didn't dare to smile. She didn't dare to take him seriously.

"Really," she breathed softly. "That's quite an interesting -"

But she broke off, because she couldn't even pretend to be dispassionate. There was a split second's pause before she flung her arms around him, a lump the size of an egg in her throat, hot tears spilling over her eyes. "Sokka," she said.

He held her. "I am so proud of you," he whispered, and a smile spread over his face like the sun coming up on a new day.

Azula didn't quite know if it would be possible to court Sokka, if he were even any sort of politically advantageous partner – but she didn't care enough to plan ahead just then. She just cared about wrapping her arms around Sokka so tight that she could imagine never having to let go.

* * *

**And there you have it. Choose one.**

**Drop me a review! Bye!**

**Speechwriter**


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